Matt Review - The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - David Karlins – Alpha
This is my second review. I have to admit that I am not good at giving a bad review and I thought about this book for a long time before I decided I did want to do the review. Before I say though why I don’t like it, let me list the good points and there are several of those.
The good…
David Karlins is a good teacher (He teaches at the MultiMedia Studies Program at San Francisco State). You can tell that from his writing. He has a good pace and covers things informally and easily. Since this is one of the Idiot’s guide books, you’d expect little else there. The easy manner makes learning Dreamweaver quite fun and if you cover a chapter a day or so, you can learn at your leisure. While he attempts to cover, at least in passing, just about everything in the app, Karlins does not bog down into detail unless absolutely necessary.
For example, he covers adding media, sound and movies in two chapters, he never even looks at the code generated. In the section about behaviors that follows it, he only covers the code where it is necessary. He does not bog down in detail.
If this were it, then this would be a great book to recommend, but Karlins has made it harder by not always doing things the easy way when there is an easy to do it.
The bad…
In the same example, the chapter on behaviors, 19, entitled Making Dreamweaver Behave, he gives you the tip of selecting the object to which you want to attach a behavior before you attach the behavior. Good advice, but rather than having you select the body in the tag selector, he asks the novice to open the code window (actually he uses the split window) and then selects the tag in the HTML. Why do that? Mix the good advice with the bad.
Also he has a section on inserting Fireworks objects, which is good, but he talks throughout about image editors and uses Photoshop as his main example while not mentioning Fireworks nearly as much although there are very close ties between Dreamweaver and Fireworks.
Karlins also does not address accessibility issues at all which are easy to do at a basic level and even that level of explanation can make for much more accessible web sites. The explanation of document relative links vs site root relative links worries me as well. He covers document relative roots well and simply (images/matt.gif), but then he skips to absolute references (http://www.whateveryourdomainis.com/images/matt.gif) and doesn’t even talk about site relative references (/images/matt.gif). I admit when I teach, this is a hard concept to get across, but it is important. I have seen more sites wrecked by the user not knowing he was using one link where he thought he was using another. This gets really nasty as well if there are any changes to the folder structure of Dreamweaver.
There are few instances of simply bad facts like the explanation of the <layer> tag in which he says the option has been removed. It has not.
The review…
Karlins has done a creditable job with the book and if you are intimidated by technical books this might be a good first book for you to get up to speed, but it is a first book and you should be thinking about what you want to add to your library to get more information and deeper examples. There are things to like here and things not to like. I would give it a 5 out of 10 Matts.
I hope David continues on with Dreamweaver and takes another crack at it next time. $19.95, (13.99 from Amazon)
2:51:04 PM
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