The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

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As a developer who is modestly adept with PHP, this book is a welcome addition to my library. With the recent release of CS3, it covers the nuts and bolts of the application(s) including the newly introduced Spry Widgets. Being a visual learner, I especially appreciated the chapter entitled "Creating a CSS Site Straight Out of the Box." The instructions were clear and concise and provided a great foundation for building future CSS based sites.

Every chapter, at least for me, was full of "Ah Ha" moments. I think I've learned more from this book than any other I've read in the past year (and there's been plenty). I even figured out how to get PHP My Admin running, thanks to this book! I recommend it highly.

If you are VERY comfortable with PHP and MySQL, this may not be the best book for you. (I say that with some reservations, though, because of the vast wealth of knowledge in this book between page 1 and page 729.) Also, if you don't know how to code in PHP, the "Introduction to the Basics of PHP" in Chapter Ten may not be enough instruction for you to comfortably appreciate this book. BUT, if you have some knowledge of PHP (for example, you are a self-taught PHP coder like myself), need the power of PHP and MySQL, and are curious about any benefits there might be from this new technology SPRY (Adobe's implementation of AJAX), this will be an excellent book for you. The writing is clear, concise (in spite of its detailed explanations), and logical.

The strength of Powers' book is providing you with the vast majority of tools you will need to create, test, and implement a dynamic Web site using the power of PHP, MySQL, SPRY, and more. For instance, Chapter Four has detailed instructions on setting up a PHP server on your hard drive to enable you to test your server-side programs. Those instructions begin with downloading the PHP installation files and end with trouble-shooting possible configuration problems, including all necessary steps in between.

The book continues with how to set up a PHP site using Dreamweaver, learning the rules, tips, and benefits of cascading style sheets (CSS), the advantages and creation of a SPRY navigation menu bar, and an in-depth examination of on-line forms and data validation. Since the next logical step is doing something with the form data, the MySQL database product is tackled beginning, again, with its installation, continuing with the use of the phpMyAdmin feature, and ending with the storage of database records (including access control and security issues). As if this was not enough information to digest, the book ends with a guide to and uses for XML and XSLT in your Web site.

One more big plus from this book is that it offers the code (tested and commented) for a number of commonly used functions on Web sites today. If you are looking for a login function, form validation function, mail function, (and the list goes on) you'll find the code in this book.

Again, there is a wealth of knowledge in this book from front cover to back cover - well organized and easy to grasp.

A fabulous book so easy to follow and informative.
This brings Dreamweaver to today and has dropped completely the outdated use of tables that others (such as H.O.T.) seem to be stuck with when the industry trend is only to insert tables into a page when using excel spreadsheets and such and never to use them for page building.
The extensive introduction of Widgets is a delight and has completely replaced those Javascript drop menu's avoiding all the pitfalls they entailed. The author leads you into dreamweaver in the usual way, most of these titles use, then easily run through tutorials that demonstrate how to build a site from simple CSS templates and from scratch. Step by step the author leads one from simple site to the introduction of widgets (new to DW CS3) through to PHP pages and on to databases and includes.
Very easy to folow and brings one up to date on the new CS3 architecture.

As the author says, "this book isn't 'Dreamweaver CS3 for the Clueless', or 'Dreamweaver CS3 for Complete Beginners'". There are plenty of books flooding the market at the moment for those users, and if that's you, I recommend you look elsewhere.

This book is intended for those who are familiar with the basics of web development with an interest in PHP, CSS, Ajax and Spry (Adobes version of Ajax). It assumes that you know your way around Dreamweaver, but that you haven't developed database driven web applications before.

As a tutorial, it is undoubtedly excellent. The author has a light and friendly writing style which works really well with this book, and he rapidly takes you from 'newbie' status to becoming an experienced developer.

As a reference book, it doesn't quite work - but I don't think that was the intention anyway. There is no 200-page index at the back listing all possible PHP and MySQL commands, but the book is all the better for it. If you need reference material, it's free on the web anyway, and personally I don't like books which use such an underhand method of giving me 'quantity' over 'quality'. This Essential Guide is exactly, and just, that.

Just one word about support. Not a word you normally associate with books, but David Powers is very active on the Adobe Dreamweaver forums, and always happy to assist readers (and others!) with any PHP-related questions. Just knowing that makes me confident about buying future books written by him.

As can be gleaned from the long title, this is an ambitious book. In almost 800 pages, David Powers overviews a wide array of technologies that can be used to build highly dynamic Web sites. The focus of the book is Dreamweaver CS3, the newest iteration of the leading Web development software from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia). After Adobe acquired Macromedia, it released Dreamweaver CS3, which incorporated the Spry framework--a library of code for creating AJAX applications. The book examines these changes, and provides demonstrations on creating Web sites using these new tools and making them work with other Web-related technologies such as PHP, CSS, XML and relational databases. Sample code is provided on the publisher's Website.

The first chapter highlights changes to Dreamweaver including Device Central and Adobe Bridge. Device Central is a feature that allows developers to preview what pages look like in handheld devices such as cell phones. Bridge is a program included with CS3 that manages images, multimedia and many other types of resources. Chapter 2 explores Spry effects, which provide ways to shake, squish, fade and otherwise manipulate elements on a Web page. Chapters 3 and 4 show readers how to create a local testing environment and how to set up Dreamweaver to work with PHP.

Chapters 5 and 6 detail CS3's support for CSS. This is helpful for those who, like myself, have written CSS by hand and have neglected support provided by Dreamweaver. The tools for handling CSS include the ability to drag page-specific styles to an external stylesheet and the ability to easily see which style rules affect a particular element on a page by using the CSS Styles panel. This section also discusses using CSS layout designs supplied by Adobe.

The next three chapters begin an in-depth exploration of various Spry widgets, code that allows a user to easily create fly-out menus, tabbed and "accordion" style interfaces, and other "oh, wow!" effects. Chapters 9 through 12 introduce PHP and discuss how to use it to send form results in an e-mail, validate user input, and include external files in a PHP page.

The next five chapters discuss setting up Dreamweaver CS3 to work with a MySQL database administered by the phpMyAdmin program. The chapters also discuss access control using PHP sessions and storing and retrieving data using PHP and the MySQL RDBMS.

Chapter 18 discusses using Dreamweaver and XSLT to display XML documents in a Web page. It also provides a brief introduction to XPath, the language that allows coders to find information in an XML document.

Chapters 19 and 20 are likely to be the most interesting for seasoned Web developers because they introduce Spry's support for dynamically displaying XML documents using AJAX. This feature allows developers to quickly create photo albums, calendars and other applications that can display new information on a Web page without reloading the page. The chapters also discuss how to retrieve information from various sources including an RBDMS.

In all, this is an ambitious book--perhaps too ambitious at times. Those without a basic foundation in the technologies discussed will likely find themselves occasionally lost. It also suffers from a few organizational problems. Certain chapters feel a bit thrown together, with disparate elements competing for the reader's attention.

However, the author does a good job of going beyond the Dreamweaver manual and showing the user how Dreamweaver can be used to build real-world Web applications. He also does a good job of explaining Spry's (and AJAX's) dark side--the complexity and size of the code, poor or non-existent accessibility for the impaired, and the requirement that JavaScript be enabled on the user's browser. He helpfully suggests workarounds for these issues.

This is a purchase that I regret. :-( I was quite disappointed by the misleading title. The book contains decent coverage of Dreamweaver for beginners. The book is not quite a tutorial but it is definitely not a comprehensive reference.

The book covers how to do basics in Spry. Spry is the AJAX framework bundled in Dreamweaver. There is no depth in the writing on Spry, and the coverage of RESTful and AJAX is minimal. The same can be said for the treatment of PHP. The coverage of PHP is superficial. There's no practical guidance on how to use PHP in Dreamweaver application development.

Two is harsh, because this is an average book and it probably merits a 3 but for the misleading title. However, I can't bring myself to mark it as a 2 because the author saw a way to sell copies. Returning to Dreamweaver after missing a couple releases, I found "Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual" to be a more complete book, and while it also covers Spry and a bit of PHP it makes no pretensions about its focus.

I have read many books on programming. While I have gleaned some value from just about every book, the page-count-to-learning ratio hasn't been great. And on a few occasions, I hit a roadblock where I simply wasn't getting what author was telling me I should be completely proficient with at that moment...anyone else experience that?? Makes me feel like a coloring-by-the-numbers code monkey. I've gone back to some of those books once I have gained some proficiency on the topic (elsewhere) to find that those authors made things unnecessarily complex. Who knows why, but it sure pisses me off.

I give you this background, so that when I say that this book is absolutely without equal in delivering actionable, easy-to-understand content on almost every single page, that is no exaggeration. I lost count of the number of times I came up with a question, only to read the very next sentence which usually went something like this, "...you are probably wondering why this is the case. Here's why..." It was incredible! And the exercises start to ween you off of the minutia at precisely the right pace (for me, anyway). It was a great confidence builder when the author wrote, "You should be comfortable with these steps at this point..." and I totally was.

Truly excellent work by David Powers and Tom Muck (who did the technical review). And they've kept their errata/updates site up-to-date with DW CS3, which definitely came in handy as I encountered current-version discrepancies with things like Spry 1.6.

One miss was, the very last exercise did not work for me. After thoroughly reviewing the sample code, my code, etc. I submitted it as errata...waiting for a response.

it is an excellent book. I'm not sure what exactly I actually expected from a book that has Dreamweaver, CSS, AJAX ad PHP (and MySQL) in its title. But one thing is for sure - this book is truly great because this book does something that a lot of other technical books do not do - it teaches you to use several technologies in a chronological way, by adding functionality to the same web site. You do not learn things by following many unrelated examples, but rather by following a step by step instructions which will lead you to the final product - a functional dynamic web site. I find this system of teaching to be the best, because it shows you the actual process of implementation of the techniques and technologies and how they work together on the same page. Teach by example. But beware, that this concept of teaching does not exactly explain the why's, but rather concentrates on the how's giving real world examples without pushing the reader to use a certain approach only to later explain why that particular approach was bad and show a good one.
Although this book is intended for beginners in programming, some of the stuff was rather hard to comprehend and you certainly should not entirely rely on this book alone and seek some more examples on the subject, just to give you more clarity. And you certainly should know your way around Dreamweaver. The author will give you a quick overview of the work environment and CSS, but this is not the book you want if you can't work with Dreamweaver at least at the upper beginner level. That applies to your knowledge of CSS too.
This is not a quick study book. You will see immediate results, but to understand what is going on and be able to use the knowledge to make your own applications will require a lot of determination and effort on your part. I personally like that - no pain, no gain. However, if you have the will to go through a lot of coding, reading, looking for that missing semi-colomn in your code and do not want to be bothered by childish examples and exercises, your perseverance will be awarded and this book will make you a better web developer. It's 5 stars and a big THANK YOU MR POWERS from me.

The author makes a good case of reviewing all of the things that come with the new release of Dreamweaver CS3. He goes over a lot of stuff, some of which I might consider too basic (CSS panel, some of the programming options in the first 7 chapters) for my tastes. It is too bad he does not spend more time with Spry, one of the reasons why I bought the book in the first place. In any case, interesting read through and through. Would be very cool if they incorporated other frameworks like YUI, Mockikit, prototype and other popular ones that are coming up.

I'm currently taking a class in PHP/MySQL and it's use in eCommerce, and this book has really helped me along the way! The author shows you the ways in which Dreamweaver can help you to reduce your development time, but still produced some really great, dynamic sites. He goes into detail on some of the code as well, which is helpful. Additionally, the author is very honest and recommends other resources for items he covers in a limited manner. If you want to learn more about connecting to a database or just using PHP for simple mailing forms, as well as some nice CSS tips, this book is for you!

This book is extremely well set out. As a newbie to the design trade I have found other text assume so much.
This publication is based on the assumption of limited knowledge and guide the reader through each step. Bit by bit. But it doesn't stop at basic knowledge, it takes you through to advanced methods and give you more resources to learn more.
It's my bible.

The chapters on using Spry with DW are worth the price of the book. In addition David has done a great job on getting across the basic fundamentals of PHP.

I don't write reviews for many of the technical books that I buy because I never feel ABSOLUTELY satified with what I learn from them. Most of them always had me looking for a second or even third book to accompany the first one for what I needed.

I love knowing every nook and cranny of any software that I buy when I am learning it. This book honestly answers my prayers for such an explanation of features and great examples. After reading just the first four chapters I felt I had a better grasp of the power house that dreamweaver can be.

Other books, like I said always were either too cold in the delivery of the material or just made me spend more money on buying another book that I could use as a companion to it. Needless to say all that reading can be frustrating. David puts everything there for you. Every chapter is on average about 20 pages long but you come away from every chapter wanting to jump right into the next.

With highest praise I urge and recommend The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 w/ CSS, Ajax and PHP.

I settled on this book after reading all the great reviews, and I'm glad I did! Clear instructions and an accessible style really make this a valuable guide. After years of thinking "I wish I knew how to do that!", I worked through the exercises in this book and within a week and a half I was able to put my first database-driven, content-managed website online. I now have a firmer grasp on CSS and will never again go back to my 1990's web design habits.

This book gave me everything I was looking for, and a lot more. I was looking for an overview of the spry network and php server-side coding and this has given me that. I also got a ton of essential shortcuts, heads up on Dreamweaver bugs, and some great tips. All this and I'm only halfway through the book! I sure got my money's worth on this one and would highly recommend to anyone getting their feet wet in the Dreamweaver/Spry/PHP pond.

Author David Powers helps Dreamweaver users take it to the next level with the Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax and PHP.

Powers, a Dreamweaver and PHP expert, guides the intermediate or ambitious beginning Dreamweaver user through the powerful and intricate upgrades of the latest version of Adobe's Dreamweaver CS3 (version 9), and then spices it up with the world's most popular open source scripting language, PHP.

Power's easy to read style keeps the tutorial like text moving along with pertinent information and many useful tips and techniques that will bring any Dreamweaver users skill level up a notch.

All the scripts are available as a download so the reader can work right along with partially started examples to build an elegant and functional website using a combination of Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script and XML (AJAX).

Finally, Powers teaches some functional basic PHP lessons and shows the reader how to integrate this highly useful and popular scripting language into making the site even more functional using concise, real world examples.

Readers already familiar with the basics of Dreamweaver will benefit the most, although it is possible for a newbie to follow along thanks to Powers easy to understand style and directions, especially the PHP section, which is for beginners.

Another "must have" David Powers book for the Dreamweaver and PHP user.

I have been a software developer for over 25 years, and have learned virtually all languages and technologies informally, through reading books and/or spending time with others versed in a particular discipline. Prior to purchasing this book my experience has been in traditional language development and operating systems, with only very limited HTML, CSS and web development knowledge.

I originally purchased and use Adobe CS3 for the design products: InDesign, Illustrator, PhotoShop, and never gave much thought to Dreamweaver. However, after stumbling across this book on Amazon, my interest was piqued and I wondered if I could leverage the power of a tool like Dreamweaver (sorry, hard-core HTML hackers!) without sacrificing the ability to control my own destiny in terms of going beyond the basics of a WYSIWYG tool with programming of PHP, JavaScript, and AJAX.

I am very pleased to report that not only is the product, Dreamweaver, capable of delivering both efficiency and power, but this book is a nearly perfect way to learn both. The author works with you like an experienced teacher throughout, often repeating steps and concepts early in the book so that they "stick", then about the time you think, "OK, I know this already", he lets you know he believes you probably get the concept and spends progressively less time on the rote, focusing on the issue at hand.

I recommend this book for anyone who is looking to explore using Dreamweaver as a web development tool. You will quickly be creating sites that are powerful and configurable using CSS, AJAX, and PHP.

I have had some experience in using Dreamweaver since version 8, and I wanted to 'marry' my meager PHP+MySQL experience in using Dreamweaver CS3 beyond what I was currently doing; creating static XHTML+CSS websites.

This book has exceeded my expectations and then some! With it, I am now able to easily create dynamic websites, all within the GUI comfort of Dw CS3. (Ok, some ad hoc hand coding may be needed.) I didn't really want to learn more about PHP programming, MySQL queries, Ajax, etc. I just wanted to know how to use tools available in Dw CS3 to manipulate web technologies, and this book delivers. Real-world examples in the book helps drive this knowledge further.

A mild caveat; this book really is an intermediate-level book. It would be helpful if you were already familiar with the technologies used in creating dynamic websites. i.e., having passing knowledge of PHP, MySQL, XHTML+CSS, Javascript, and Dw CS3. That said, the book does include a PHP and MySQL primer.

Some minor snits;
This book covered the installation of a LAMP stack on a local machine. (Either Windows or Mac) I would have liked to see a chapter on installing a LAMP server (Ubuntu is great!) on a laptop or a computer running in a home network. After some fair amount of trial and error, I was able to have a testing server on another machine, freeing up my main machine for Dw CS3 and other tasks.

It would be nice if the book could have followed up with more examples of extending Dw CS3. The book did show one example of how to add in a customized server behavior, and I wanted to see more of that. Less hand-coding, and more GUI coolness via these extensions would help making working in Dw CS3 a more enjoyable experience.

Anything that David Powers puts his pen to is worth reading (and in this case following). Excellent. I also bought his PHP Solutions which is equally valuable.

Great book, had me up and running and using PHP for forms quickly, but most importantly gave me understanding!

David Powers really knows how to present this topic in an easy to understand way. The book is very helpful in learning how the items fit together. This book was recommended on the Dreamweaver forum by many of the people who post to it and after purchasing, I can see why. This book is a must if you are learning Dreamweaver, CSS and PHP. It's not only for beginners, but for anyone. Polar_bare

Very good book. I am at intermediate level and this book showed me exactly how to build php enabled web sites. Highly recommend it for users who have used Dreamweaver before and has a developer background.

This book is a must for anyone looking to get stuck into PHP, AJAX and Dreamweaver (as in the title). The steps are clearly written and easy to follow with troubleshooting sections at the end of each chapter. The steps for setting up a local server (Apache or IIS) or again well written with good advice that you are able to choose or ignore. I highly recommend this book!!

Mr Powers....write us another book soon pleeeaaasssee!!!

I dont normally review books, but I thought this one was worth reviewing. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who works with dreamweaver and wants to create modern, standards compliant websites and web applications.

The book is well written and thoroughly covers the subjects it claims to cover.

Each chapter is also written in such a way that it could be read independently of the other chapters. This is highly useful if you only want to cover one or two of the three primary subjects covered (css, php and ajax with Dreamweaver cs3).

By the end of this book you will be able to create basic (though useful) web apps, validate user input in forms, use dreamweaver's built in ajax functions (spry) to make content much more interesting and create standards compliant websites that will be viewable in all browsers.

I have a lot of books. I teach this stuff and try to read everything I can. This book is great. Easy to follow and the tasks are a useful way to learn how to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This goes from easy to more advanced in each section so anyone that needs to learn how to use CSS will get value. I highly recommend this book.

I LOVE THIS BOOK. David Powers did a great job on this book. I've been looking for a book to teach me dreamweaver cs3, css, and php and this book delivers. It killed three birds with one stone. The book is wonderfully written, easy to understand, easy to follow, contains no php errors. This book has saved me countless hours of headaches and frustration. This is a sixth book I bought on php and it actually works. Only bad thing about this book is you wished there was more, a part 2. Once you start this book you can't sit it down. Everything goes so smooth. David Powers has me hooked I hope he writes a book for cs4 when it come out.

Covers exactly what the title suggests, and does does effectively.

Utilising Dreamweaver's inbuilt PHP functions can speed up the production time of a new website.

This book has saved my butt so many times now! I've only had it a couple months now but every question I've came up with on Dreamweaver, PHP, MySQL, Spry, Ajax or CSS, I have been able to easily find and work trough in this book. This is THE BIBLE for any Dreamweaver CS3 user out there! I would recommend it to everyone!

I haven't finished this book yet. I have completed the chapter on how to setup a testing server for php. So far I am very pleased with the book it has allowed me to setup a server and test my php code. This book is well worth the price just for this.

This book is a wonderful assistant for people they like to dive into DW and PHP. It completes all my questions and it's tips are rule!

This book is excellent for developers looking to create php applications using dreamweaver cs3. i haven't found a better book on the subject, and the book is very well written. I recommend it.