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From:David Powers , friends of ED ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#19356 |
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5 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
This Book Saved Me!, 2008-04-25
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!
12 of 12 customers found the following review helpful:
The very best programming/instructional book I've ever read, 2008-03-18
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.
Great Book, 2008-03-15
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.
A Perfect book, 2008-03-12
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!
9 of 9 customers found the following review helpful:
Not exactly what I was looking for but...., 2008-03-08
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.
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