I've been doing amateur web design on and off for about 6 years now. I wanted to catch up with what the professionals are doing these days. I was not able to make sense of CSS until I got this wonderful book from my university bookstore. It's written with clarity and deep understanding of every step of the web design process. In addition to CSS and template, I loved the chapter on how to make the design on paper and then in Photoshop before heading to Dreamweaver. This helped a lot! The website I designed this time looks much better than any site I'd done before. Thanks so much! I'm still going to volunteer to design websites for the academic community, and I'm still going to refer to this book, esp. those interactive chapters in the second half of the book. Good job! Well done!

Sorry you feel you wasted your money, SJ. Actually, the book was written by three people, not one as you seem to think. "Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004" is a beginner-level book about using Dreamweaver MX 2004, which explores the development of a website using XHTML and CSS; and in the second half, it takes the reader's knowledge further by showing how to build a dynamic website with PHP and MySQL.

You criticize the JavaScript, but seem unaware of the fact that it's perfectly legal to omit the semicolon from the end of a statement. Why didn't we explain the workings of the JavaScript? Because it's a book about Dreamweaver, not a JavaScript tutorial, that's why. Dreamweaver inserts a large amount of JavaScript into web pages, and most users don't have the faintest idea what it does - but they do know it works. And the short script that we added in the book works, too. And when one reader contacted me through the friends of ED forum, I rewrote the script (free of charge) to add extra features to it. He certainly didn't feel he'd wasted his money - he was delighted.

You also complain that there is no explanation about capitalizing h2 tags. In fact, an entire page (page 88) was devoted to the subject. The style of the h2 tags (as of all other tags) is controlled by CSS. The real pity is that you didn't take up the invitation to ask questions in the friends of ED forum. You would have got a fast and I hope helpful answer, and perhaps have joined the large number of apparently very happy readers.

As with all books, it may not be perfect. My co-authors and I were not happy at the size of some of the illustrations, and conveyed our feelings to the publisher. I'm pleased to say that they listened, and steps have been taken to prevent it happening again in future books. Still, it's an exaggeration to say you need a magnifying glass. All the details that readers need to copy from illustrations are clearly legible.

Very sorry I wasted my money on this book.

I am a computer science major and am quite familiar with PHP, HTML, Mysql and most of the items he puts into this book. I bought it to teach me dreamweaver. Although this guy is probably very smart, he is a horrible writer. If you're dead set on getting this book, the first thing I recommend you do is get a magnifying glass. A few times he asks you to duplicate code that is inside a black and white square that is maybe 2 and a half inches. His code has so many inconsistencies. For example, in the javascript section (which I once studied but remember very little of) he puts semi colons at the end of some code and not others (such as two different variable declarations one with a semi colon and one without). So instead of learning javascript I'm spending time looking up his inconsistencies. The code in the book doesn't match the code he provides on his website. Once he said something like "Above I have used the escape sequence for quotation marks..." and he hadn't. So I download the code on his website to see if he had, and of course he did.

I know it's a dreamweaver book but when you put javascript in it and don't explain how it works I'm a little turned off. He never explains his code, only says "If you don't understand this code just type it and don't worry about it". Pfft. He frequently switches files without mentioning that he did so. For example, i think once I was working in the iceland.js file and he wrote "Now paste this code back in your file..." and hadn't asked you to open anything else. He wastes a lot of pages on talking about general configuration of dreamweaver that most people can figure out by just looking at the preferences tab. I found that he skipped some configuration in the book.. For example he notes that "Since we've edited our H2 tags to capitolize all the text anything surrounded by the h2 tags should appear in all caps" and shows an example of this. Well, I skipped back through the whole chapter and didn't see a single spot where he asked you to change the h2 tag to uppercase.

The guy knows his stuff but he shouldn't be writing books. Look elsewhere for dreamweaver help. Too frustrating to read this one.

I used dreamweaver MX and I also got myself through Dreamweaver MX: Training from the source before (which to be honest, was really boring to me.... each chapter felt like it would never end.....), but I never had the confidence in using dreamweaver for any big project of mine, I still used it just to save time on my XHTML and stuff like that!
I then got my hands on Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004. Now I'll admit, I am a big fan of Friends of ED books and it is thanks to their foundation series that have got me going with my Flash MX side, but I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. I read the reviews on amazon.com and they all seemed positive... so I went ahead and dedicated time to this book.
As one of the previous reviews said, it truly doesn't waste time in the shallow end, giving no disrespect to you by teaching you how to do such common things like "SAVING", which I'm pretty sure I remember was in the training from the source book from before.. I mean if you're so new to computers, chances are you wouldnt have dived out and spent all that money to purchase of all programs, dreamweaver mx 2004!
It starts off by diving into a project and how you would/should first start off, then it starts to pave the pathway for using dreamweaver and it guides you to the creation of a static website. So the first half was relatively straightforward and easy because it doesn't really require anything more than knowing HTML/XHTML.. then comes the 2nd bit, and being a programmer myself meant that the bit on the basic language of PHP was a bit boring because I knew all the concepts, however, the excitement began once I created my own content management system, I was loading information from databases and stuff like that! Sure Dreamweaver does a lot of the work for you, but you can only let it do it when you understand how, not just know how, but understand how it all works together. I hate books that teach you "To do this, you click here, then type this, then click ok" and end there, this book does something and usually for instructions that I have a question about, I'll find an explanation of what just went on underneath it... good stuff! Mind you, there are also some cool tips a seasoned user might know but a beginner will have to find out through either mistakes or just luck.
Personally, I really hate and love this book. Hate it because it gets me excited when I get a quick glance at what I'm about to do in the next chapter and I start trying to read more and more within one day and neglecting other things. Love it because right now, having finished the book 2 days ago (Today is 28th July, 2004), I have to say I'd tell anyone who wants to learn Dreamweaver mx 2004 to get this book...definitely. It might not take u from zero to a professional, thats because its not like other books that are 195023852028502492 pages long, but it gives you enough of a grip for you to have the guts to go and explore and try new things and tell that guy next to you "Yep, I know how to use dreamweaver mx 2004" :)

This is a great book for certain kinds of people, and maybe not so great for others, so it's important you're able to assess your style of learning to avoid disappointment with it.

I love it and think it's one of the most fantastic books of its kind for any application -and I'll tell you why: they don't fill pages with over-detailed explanations of simple interface issues and figure that's teaching you the application; they teach you the application as a means to make sites. You're always in the thick of using Dreamweaver to accomplish the real-world tasks involved in designing, building and launching a site. They cover tangent technologies as they come up in the process of building the book's example site, so you're learning way more than just how to push Dreamweaver along -PHP, MySQL,the Apache server, CSS, accessibility issues, etc., -whatever you'd come across getting the site done and online. The catch is you need to be able to follow deep material covered in few pages, because it covers the most ground, in the most depth and in the fewest amount of pages I've come across in a computer book. YET- everything is explained so you're not left feeling steps were left out or that you're being told to just imitate without being given enough to understand why and what's going on.

I love it because you're constantly being challenged to keep up with all the diverse information that weaves in & out of the website creation process. The layout helps enormously by breaking the information into different visual chunks per page, and the screen shots are big enough to be informative and clear despite being b&w throughout.

An excellent return on your time investment with this one; you'll come away with a lot more understanding than just how to work Dreamweaver's interface, if you're willing and able to keep taking giant steps following along.