• Live examples. With a step-by-step annotated tutorial, readers follow the construction of a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with Flash buttons, Cascading Style Sheets, and dynamic databases.
• Tricks of the trade. The book is bursting with undocumented workarounds and shortcuts.
• Design guidance. Readers can create any modern web feature, including forms, animations, pop-up windows, and more. This book lets you know which browsers, situations, and audiences are appropriate for each.

David McFarland wrote this book, but the influence of esteemed series editor David Pogue is obvious in the careful coverage of features and frequent touches of humor (books about applications can be whangingly dull; the books in Pogue's Missing Manual series consistently manage to avoid this problem while maintaining comprehensiveness). The two men treat Dreamweaver's numerous features (and the even more numerous ways of putting them to use) cleverly, with a combination of procedures and side information that clarifies many oddball situations as well as straightforward conditions. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to create HTML (XHTML and CSS, strictly speaking) documents using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. In addition to the basic stuff (text, images, links, and frames), the book shows you how to build forms for data submission and embed Flash movies and Java applets. There's also a lot of helpful emphasis on Dreamweaver's productivity features, like snippet libraries and file transfer utilities. A special section shows you how to do some server-side work with databases.