As a Useful Intro, Belies the title, October 18, 2003

By 

Mike Blaszczak (Mercer Island, WA, USA) – See all my reviews

  

I’m a very experienced computer professional, but I’ve never developed my own website from scratch. I’ve always thought it was a more design-oriented task than to do much with software development. When I agreed to help a club I’m involved with build a website, I decided to tackle learning Dreamweaver.

A book called “Unleashed” makes me figure that it’s about getting the most power out of a tool. This book falls short of that goal as its treatment of the subject is very broad and not that deep. I found just enough information to get me started with the features I wanted to use, and a few tips on how to use them properly.

The title has a few walkthroughs which make basic pages and a couple of simple sites. After working through them, I felt like I could competantly build my own sites and get to work, but I didn’t think that I had “unleashed” anything.

The book’s shallow coverage is almost necessary as Dreamweaver is a very rich product. But the book makes…

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Pretty much of a mess, May 22, 2006

By 

John Donivan – See all my reviews

  

First, the good news. This is not a bad book, if you can work through the bad news, below. It shares a failing of many computer books – 1/4 of the pages are redundant. “To change the colors……” “To format the type….” Over and over again. I suppose if one is skipping through, as I often do, it makes each chapter stand on it’s own. However, in “Frames”, for instance, the whole chapter is on trivia – how to move them, resize them, the Obvious. Then at the end there is 1 (one) tiny section about the meat – how to get the pages in the windows – barely more than a paragraph. But it’s not a bad book – gradually you can sift out the useful stuff – most of it’s buried in there somewhere, under the preoccupation with sizing, colors, etc.

One writer talked about typos and errors – FIRE THAT EDITOR NOW!!! He didn’t notice, I guess, aside from what he did notice, that so many of the photos are wrong that you can’t trust any of them. The captions and the text refer to a…

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Broad scope, but full of errors and inacuracies, June 10, 2003

By 

Randy Farnsworth (Northern Utah, Near the Lake, USA) – See all my reviews

  

How could any editor in his/her right mind let any book go to print with this many mistakes? This thing is packed with typos, misspellings, code errors and downright wrong information. There are so many errors, you’d think it was written by Microsoft!

I haven’t finished the book yet, I’m currently on Chapter 26. I’m slogging through it though, page by page, because there is a lot of good information in it – enough to warrant the two stars. But please, if you’re taking the time to write a book, then hire an editor that can proof it, including the code, and fix all your screwups. A typo here or there is forgivable (I’m sure there’s a few in this review); a coding error or two is forgivable; but producing a book with this many mistakes, then selling it for a dear sum, is just plain wrong. Oh wait, Microsoft does that with their software, so I guess it’s commonplace and accepted.

As for the good parts of the book, it does cover many different areas, and I like the fact that it tries…

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