As the Web has evolved, so too have users’ expectations of it--which means that today’s Web developers are being forced to deal with issues that weren’t even considerations not long ago. How do you develop a site that customizes itself to individual users? How can you design your site so that even nontechnical users will be able to contribute content? To answer these questions and more, you need this book. By examining your favorite Web authoring program--Dreamweaver MX 2004--in the context of databases and the technology solutions that have grown out of them, this book/CD combo will have you moving from static to dynamic sites in no time. You don’t need programming experience to construct the fictional travel tour site that’s the centerpiece of this volume. Just follow along with the 16 hands-on lessons (which include side-by-side ASP PHP, and ColdFusion code), and you’ll be well on your way to the interactive, easy-to-maintain, and standards-compliant sites that represent the way of the future.

Good Overview
Excellent book to teach you fundamentals of working these three techologies into your web site. I would, however, recommend that you pick one and run through the whole course instead of trying to learn all three at one time.

A little more hand coding than I would prefer for this. I would like more emphasis on the panel features built into Dreamweaver. This is not a book for code warriors, it is good for people who want to make the transition from static web sites to dynamic content.

Don’t Buy This Book
The more I got into the web site design that I bought this book to help with, the more useless this book became. If you want to build a toy web site, this book *may* help. If you want to build a professional looking web site, this book is useless.

Fantastic!
I can’t recommend this book highly enough! I’d worked with static sites for years and was learning to hosh-posh sites together with some dynamic content. Many pieces are coming together now in my head thanks to this book. It offers great examples and the ’why’ behind what you’re doing. I wish Jeffrey Bardzell wrote a book on Flash...

The Best Book on the Topic
This book is excellent! We highly recommend it. Jeffery Bardzell handles the matter of building a dynamic website with exact step by step examples and builds the sample Newland Tours website. This book is identical to Macromedia’s "Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications" training from the source, except that this book has PHP references in it as well. Therefore if you have that book, you don’t need this one and visa versa.

SAkers
Nice book for beginners. However, not a book for programmers. What little code view you can see is constantly cut off so you cannot see the complete code. A lot of guess work is involved. Also, the code that is spelled out within the text does not stand out so it tends to blend into the text a little too easily. On a positive note, this book does give you a good overview of the basics of dynamic web programming.

Excellent Introduction to Dynamic Programming
I found this book to be an excellent introduction to dynamic web programming. It doesn’t go into too much detail on how to build specialized web applications, but it will show you how to do just about everything you will need to get started (e.g. registering, authenticating a user, creating pages accessible to users based on user level which you define, updating databases, etc.). It not only shows how to get Dreamweaver to write code for you, it also shows you how to write code yourself to creat pages to manage content.

It would be a good idea to be familiar with XHTML first. Before starting on this book, I went through "HTML & XHTML: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference Series)" (ISBN 007222942X), which I find also to be a good reference. I wouldn’t sell my copy of either of these books at this point. If you’re familiar with XHTML, you will get more out of Bardzell’s book.

Some areas of improvement: I was using ASP VB Script because it was convenient (I was running IIS), but if I were to choose PHP, which I would have liked to do, then things would have been more complicated. He should tell you how to run a php server (for dynamic content) along with IIS, but says that it is beyond the scope of the book.

Despite this, the book is outstanding.

Even a technophobe can use this book.
I recently purchased Dreamweaver MX and found that I could not use it at all. I puchased this book based upon a recommendation from a friend. Now, less than a month later, I have a basic website up and running. If you want to see what this book helped me do, go to, "www.MrGustafson.com" I highly recommend this book. Do not waste your money on any others.

A Great Beginning For Dynamic Web Site Development
I decided, after many hours of reviewing "canned" scripts for a voting application, I had to learn how to develop my own dynamic applications in order to achieve required voting features. As a longtime user of Dreamweaver for static HTML applications, I purchased the referenced course with the expectation that I would be able to understand the concepts and learn the basic fundamentals of dynamic web site development. I had little understanding of data bases or server side programming languages (I learned Fortran eons ago).

This step by step guide took me through the development from a sample HTML 4 static site to an XMHTL compliant, fully dynamic web site not only using the built-in support functions of Dreamweaver, but hand coding the scripting language and SQL commands as well. Spread out over several months, I completed the course cover-to-cover. At each step I made sure I understood the concepts of dynamically modifying static HTML with the selected server side language and the SQL required for retrieving data from/inserting data into the data base. You were also instructed how to setup a "localhost" development environment, wherein each step could be tested immediately upon completion. I used the PHP/MYSQL model since it was available on my host ISP. But during the course, I also setup both .asp and coldfusion (.cfm) server models.

This learning by doing course reinforces the concepts and fundamentals that just reading alone could never accomplish. Once armed with this basic knowledge, I began to develop my customized voting site. And, using online tutorials, bridging gaps in the basics of PHP and SQL syntax. During coding, the manual proved to be an invaluable resource, both from a conceptual and a practical (coding) point of view, although the complexity of the requirements required significantly more php coding than in the course.

Now that I have completed my program, and it is functioning flawlessly online, I could not have done it without taking this course. There may be similar courses available, but by using the features of Dreamweaver in conjunction with the tutorial, yields a superior teaching tool that reading books alone cannot provide. And Dreamweaver is exactly as the name implies, weaving your concepts (dreams) into a functional fabric of operating programs.

Gerald Peters