5 Comments

1. Larry G. Bainbridge

   Posted on January 26, 2010 at 4:37 pm

   This is truly the missing book that belongs on any up-and-coming web designer, or someone who would like to learn how to design dynamic pages. This book walks you through the necessary steps of static website creation and then beautifully aides you in the setup of a webserver and related technologies to run dynamic content. Then the reader is taken through all necessary steps to create asp, php, and colffusion pages. I have MANY books on php, mysql, asp and coldfusion but NONE are as useful as this. This book is more for someone who has some web designing experience and some dreamweaver knowledge. The sample files are beautifully constructed so that you can start on any chapter or work from the beginning, and the files all build upon each ther toward a single website which will reinforce good techniques. I would recommend this book to anyone who has NO experience in writing programming code or someone with a lot of experience but needs help using it in Dreamweaver. Perfect Book!! Well done.
   Rating: 5 / 5
2. Mark Twain

   Posted on January 26, 2010 at 1:46 pm

   I found the book to be so superficial that it is essentially worthless to anyone who needs to use Dreamweaver CS3 dynamically. The book is well written and the tutorials are thoughtful but there is so little understanding of the material covered (server side scripting, XML, databases, AJAX, etc) that any designer who is asked to build a dynamic website will look to other sources. Use this book if you are already familiar with backend development. However, the tutorials presented are so limited in scope that if a designer/developer’s only experience of backends is this book, you’re in a LOT OF TROUBLE.
   Rating: 1 / 5
3. Guido T. Sarducci

   Posted on January 26, 2010 at 12:29 pm

   Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP: Training from the Source

   I’ve used other Jeff Bardzell books before and found them very good for beginning code.

   The latest edition, covers Spry somewhat, which is helpful. And, as in the previous edition, Bardzell conducts tutorials to build an application in ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP for the fictious company Newland Tours.

   However, there are abundant code typos, which can be very difficult for beginners. The book should have an errata site/blog somewhere; this is a major disappointment in this new edition.

   Guido T. Sarducci
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. D.J.K.

   Posted on January 26, 2010 at 11:25 am

   Bought this book for a class that taught the subject matter and was sorely disappointed in it. The book was oft times long winded in its discussions and tried to mix too much beginner information into its subject matter to be clearly a book for such a rather advanced subject matter. In the end it felt like I was not given enough training in server side scripting and like I wasted time and money on the class and the book.

   I hate to say this, but there are better books out there that can cover the subject matter, for instance I’ve already started work on David Powers’ The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP and easily feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.
   Rating: 2 / 5
5. bbjunk

   Posted on January 26, 2010 at 11:15 am

   This book could have been way better. It never really discussed the database/PHP portion in much detail. It basically just had you blindly typing in code thru wizards and not explaining enough of what was really happening in the background. If there was anything good about this book, maybe… it is the fact that it introduced me to the great “front-end” dev tool dreamweaver. Other then that, you really need to get a book that teaches you how to hand code PHP/MySql, otherwise you will be totally lost ! Good luck
   Rating: 2 / 5