If you really are new to Dreamweaver, there might be some understandable trepidation at the size of this book, that claims to be for beginners! But the bulk is due in no small part to the authors choosing to describe 3 case studies. The implementation of code for each case illustrates various ways to use Dreamweaver.

One interesting point of the book, compared to others on Dreamweaver, is that it seems to give equal emphasis to both the visuals that you can make, and to hooking pages all the way back to a database. Most Dreamweaver books concentrate on the former. But here is exhaustive detail on using ASPs or JSPs on the web server. It also looks at integrating Dreamweaver with PHP and MySQL, a popular combination. Graphics designers may not be so enthralled by some of this back end stuff, but on large websites, it is essential.

Despite the fact that some reader reviewers don't think you should have to read a book from beginning to end, this book is set up that way. In fact, the introduction, and back cover indicate that you will build 3 complete websites in the book, so its obvious that you can't just jump around and hope to keep everything straight. (I don't do web development that way, either.)

What I do want to point out about this book, is Imar Spaanjaars - one of the 3 authors on the book, who is absolutely amazing. I subscribe to the book's support forum at p2p.wrox.com, and Imar never fails to answer a dreamweaver question, or provide a solution - even when it does not involve the book. To me, that alone was worth the price of the book.

Thank you Wrox for a great Dreamweaver book, and thank you in particular to Imar.

I am very surprised to read anything other than a glowing review for this book. I had got to a certain point with building websites [ie just completed 2 intro courses on ASP] and needed to gain a fuller understanding of how to access Dreamweaver's dynamic data area. I searched around for a while [on Amazon, of course!] and liked the look of what this book had to offer. When I got it I was more than satisfied. I concentrated most on the second section - the football project - and found the style of writing in this section and the book overall very user-friendly and easy to follow. To respond to the point about not supplying downloads - they do supply these!! You are pointed to the wrox.com site where you can do exactly that if you get stuck with your own code.

I would heartily recommend this book to anyone wishing to gain a good understanding of Dreamweaver - and have fun on the way! Even more to the point, this book has helped enormously in terms of my career progress.

I have found the structure of this book immensly helpful. Its unique feature is that it guides you to systematically develop three complete web sites. Most of the other books tell you various ways of dealing with `parts', but this book deals with the `whole' - which is exactly what the beginner needs. For the same reason you will need some patience to follow this book - everyday you will pick up from where you left yesterday. But then you will see the site taking shape in front of your eyes.

The book guides you step by step through various stages of the development process of each web site and after each particular stage it explains `how it works' behind the screens. So the reader knows exactly what is happening and why it is happening - he is not blindly hitting the keys only because `the book says so'.

Another great feature of the book is the online support available on the p2p forum. At times when I got stuck and didn't see the expected results on screen, I posted my queries on the forum and got them answered in no time. At other times I could just go through the queries posted by the other readers - which was again very helpful, because all were referring the same book. So many of my queries got answered without even posting them on the forum.

The book has three web sites developed step by step. The first one is static and the other two dynamic. I found the the first two sites much straight forward and well explained. The last site deals with building a structure of a dynamic site which can later on be developed with just the data from the data base. I found this chapter a bit complicated and felt that it could have been explained in more detail. However since I got a readymade structure at my disposal, I know I can develope many more sites based on this structure, by just filling the values in the database.

When I bought this book, I was a complete novice in the field of Dreamwever. When I finished the book I had the satisfaction of having developed three complete web sites. Since these three web sites are all completely different in nature from each other, I got a wide experience in developing static as well dynamic sites. Most importantly this book lent me a confidence to build web sites using Dreamweaver. Go for it if you are a beginner and if you want the satisfaction of having developed a web site on your own.

To get the most out of this book you would have to read it straight through. I don't read 731 page computer books straight through. Some books give you the sample code for each chapter, This book does not.

You build the code from the very beginning and if you screw up the code for chapter 3 well then you will have a hard time with the subsequent chapters. If you already knew the material in chapter 3 and skipped that chapter then you will have a hard time with the subsequent chapters. At times I had problems with the example but I wasn't sure if I had mis-typed something 3 chapters before that caused the problem or if his instructions were bad.

Another annoying feature of the book (e.g. P 109) is when the author has a lengthy bit of mindless text in his example and he says "...start typing the text shown in Figure 3-51". If he had the code for that chapter in the downloads I could copy and paste the text from his sample and concentrate on the issues that motivated me to buy the book in the first place.

I don't think I will ever finish this book because I may have screwed up something in chapter 3 and now many chapters later I just don't want to go back to chapter 3 and I can't proceed b/c it requires the code from a previous section.

If you have a lot of patience and like to type chunks of filler text verbatim then this may be a good book for you.

Personally I think the authors could have done a better job with the examples and I would have gotten my money's worth out of it. Instead I will probably never finish it.