Book Club

When I started this book, I was pleased to find that it gave a primer on how HTML differed from XHTML. The book explained that it is a move is from "presentation-oriented" tags to "content-descriptive" tags. The early lessons guide you in a search/replace of HTML tags for XHTML tags, and lets you see how these changes are implemented. Another lesson guides you in adding CSS to a site.

Once these preparatory lessons are complete, the book moved on to setting up the dynamic sites. The book limits itself to instruction in two of the server-side languages: ASP and ColdFusion. One thing I learned while working on the lessons was that you couldn't just test the pages in a browser. Browsers only understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so the ASP and ColdFusion have to be processed on a server. The server processes the information and outputs it as HTML before it gets sent to the browser.

This book follows the "Training From the Source" format, with easy to follow step-by-step instructions and plenty of screen shots. If I didn't have time to complete a lesson in one sitting, it was easy to pick up from where I left off. I found lots of great information in the "notes" and "tips" in each chapter. Another plus is that the book includes a cd with all the lesson files and the completed files. This is great, so you can see how close (or far off) your pages end up.

Even though "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX: Dynamic Applications" isn't presented as a "reference" book, I think it could be used that way as you work on creating your own web pages later on.

Review by: Kathy Senecal
January 25, 2006