Better than I thought it would be, March 16, 2011

I was a little disappointed when I received this book. I had to buy it for my e-business class at Milwaukee Atrea Technical College. When I saw the size of the book I thought, “This is IT???” Each chapter is short, but gets right to the point. It is current enought that I can use the examples of websites to understand more about the topic of each chapter. Considering how fast information gets old in this day, it’s not bad for a textbook. – Valerie Schuler

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Ideal for self or academic study, March 14, 2010

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) – See all my reviews

  

  

This book would make an excellent choice for individuals needing a book for any of the following purposes:

*) The manager that understands that Web 2.0 can be used for business purposes and does not know what it is, so they need a book for self-study.

*) The community education department that is looking for a text in Web 2.0 principles so that a course about Web 2.0 for business can be offered.

*) The college or high school instructor teaching a class in basic computer literacy that wants to add a more detailed section on the uses of Web 2.0.

The authors provide sufficient detail of the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as blogging, wikis and instant messaging so that the novice can understand and use them. For the academic users, at the end of each chapter there is a set of chapter review questions and a separate set of chapter project questions. No answers to any of these questions are included.

Although…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Great start . . ., July 14, 2004

I’ve used this book for my Web Animation class and while it doesn’t tell you every little thing you need to know about Flash. It’s a great book to get started, especially if you need to work off of real examples then the cd-rom files included would really help. Although I wished that this book covered certain subjects in more detail and included more tutorials . . . This book would be good for beginners and maybe even intermediate users could use this as a reference. It gives you a nice balance of Flash animation and web design. However, after reading this book, you’ll probably end up buying more books on Flash like me. If you’re going to be focusing more on Flash web design, you might want to buy the Flash MX 2004 ActionScript Bible as well.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Not enough hands on tutorials, June 23, 2004

By 

L. Don Southard “bjjlifer” (Erie, CO United States) – See all my reviews

  

On the positive side this is a very comprehensive book. This would be an excellent reference book for intermediate to advanced Flash developers. On the the other hand it is not a very good book for beginners. I learn best by actually doing examples or tutorials. Unfortunately, there is not much of that in this book.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Excellent Starter book, September 15, 2005

By 

Lawrence Gladnick “Larrypg” (Wilmington, De USA) – See all my reviews

  

I buy every Flash Bible because they are the most comprehensive guides to Flash. This is a great book for people just starting out in flash because it will take your from beginner to intermediate Flash designer. It is also an excellent reference guide for the more experienced users.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

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…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

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…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

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…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Fabulous! The perfect CSS book for the beginner or novice., September 25, 2006

“Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional” by Simon Collison is the perfect book for newcomers to CSS and for those slightly more-experienced CSS designers who need a soup-to-nuts review.

The book is very well organized, easy to read, easy to digest, and well edited. The progression of chapters is logical, as the book flows from CSS mechanics to layout and design concepts. Topics are covered completely yet succinctly; at just over 400 pages, this is not a typical, bloated computer book. Coverage is complete, however, and nothing seems to be left out. There’s a very useful, 15-page CSS reference guide in the appendix, and URL’s for many third-party articles and examples are provided throughout the text.

Collison’s writing style is relaxed, clear, and appropriately humorous. He even tells you (often — he’s English!) when’s a good time to grab a cup of tea. He presents complex topics very clearly, using progressively built-up examples…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Excellent If you Want To Move From Tables To CSS, January 6, 2007

By 

J. Warren “ngcomputing.com” (Vernon, FL) – See all my reviews

  

This book is ideally suited for those who are still using table based layouts. If you are familiar with tables and want a smooth transition to table free layouts, that are easy to manage, this book is a must have.

Coming from a background of using table layouts and a bit of CSS, mostly for fonts, I found that the writing style of the author was very clear. In particular, I like that the author writes a code snippet, explains it, demonstrates it, then as he progresses, repeats the process pulling all the snippets together to render the final / polished results. I only had to refer back to a previous chapter just a few times, when tackling a new topic.

In reality, it took about 4-5 days to complete the book — that is reading the book in its entirety, something as a programmer, I rarely do, skipping about finding only what applies to me. You will need to read the entire book to get a full understanding of CSS because each section throughout the chapters builds…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment (1)

A Book Written for Your Solid Launch into the CSS-Sphere, May 9, 2007

By 

Steve Bailey “Steve” (U.S.) – See all my reviews

  

Finally, I have a book that I can recommend to someone as *The* first CSS book.

The first indication to me that this was an excellent purchase was the fact that Simon started off this book with a strategy as to how *organize* your CSS!

After all, it’s a Given that throughout the years you will be spending as a web designer, that you will be continually adding to your collection/library of CSS code! So you’ve got that excellent foundation of Simon’s seasoned experience in how to best structure your growing library of reusable and specific-purpose CSS.

Also, some instant gratification, for me at least: Early in my reading, I was happy to come to the very clear distinction between How to use, When to use, the Id (the pound sign) and the Class (the period). It made me feel like a CSS Pro from the get-go.

-How does that “em” thing really work? Read this book.

-How do those tedious margin and padding properties work? Finally, no more trial and…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Very good book, November 8, 2009

By 

Robert Barry (Pittsburgh) – See all my reviews

  

This book gives exactly what it says it will. Lots of good info and practical applications of XML in the classic and new versions.

Easy to read. Lots of examples.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Not for newbies, May 27, 2010

One doesn’t need any previous XML knowledge to work with this book. XML itself is quite simple. What gets complicated is when you get past the basic tag structure and begin using DTD, DOM, XSLT and XPath. That is when your head starts to hurt. Fortunately, Flash’s’ implementation of XML eliminates the need for all those technologies (except DTD which is out-dated). The only XML technology needed for Flash would be XSD (XML Schema). And this book doesn’t cover that.

I think a beginner in ActionScript, or Flash in general, would be fairly well lost, however, even though it is a “Foundation” book. Although the ActionScript isn’t all THAT bad and I have only found 1 typo in the code examples. However, even for someone familiar with ActionScript, the explanations of the example code just skims the surface. I would suggest that a beginner finish a strictly AS book before starting this book. Possibly Foundation ActionScript 3.0. I just bought it, to update my skills from AS 2,…

Read more

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment

Excellent source for understand Flash related XML, March 4, 2009

By 

K. Addaquay (New York) – See all my reviews

  

Very interesting read… Sas gets deep into talking about as3 xml. even though i wasnt too happy about not covering xmlsocket this book i would recommend this book to anyone who works a lot with xml. good job sas!

K

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? 

>Report abuse
| Permalink

 Comment