Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickProject Guide Review by Peter K. Evans
Flawed but Useable
Although the book gives you the impression that you'll be building the website shown in the book from start to finish, much like you'd assemble a piece of IKEA furniture, the book itself is never quite committed to this goal. Sometimes it seems like you are indeed building the project in the book, at other times the lessons appear isolated from each other, and are shown only for you to apply them to your own project. If the site in the book were a table from IKEA, you would end up with two legs attached to the top, plus a number of parts left over, and be one frustrated owner.
The book should be re-edited to live up to its QuickProject name, strictly focusing on the concept of walking the reader through a project from start to finish, and put together in a smoother fashion so that you are indeed building the site as shown, and will end up, at the end, with the site as shown.
That said, I was able to use the book to approximately build the site depicted in the book, but this was only after cursing the places where one lesson didn't flow into the next, and girding myself to forge ahead anyway. There were a number of times where I wanted to throw the book at the wall, and I consider myself to be someone who is good at putting things together. Someone with less determination would have given up, and I couldn't blame them.
This is a shame, because the visuals are beautiful, and the step by step instruction, within a lesson or major concept is very good. I learned a lot about Dreamweaver quite effortlessly, once I got past the choppy nature of the book, and became willing to accept a much less than perfect website. I did feel a bit cheated however.
The obvious lack of testing of the instructions in this book is amateurish, and the people who produced this book should be ashamed of themselves, given all the other great work that went into it. This could've been a really great tutorial but for the obvious lack of focus on the QuickProject core concept, and the lack of follow through to make sure the entire web project flowed seamlessly.