Mini-review And Competition Of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP book

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With over 3 million users worldwide, Adobe's Dreamweaver is the most popular web development software in the world, and it just took another step forward with CS3, the new version released in 2007. Having come a long way from its humble beginnings as a simple web design tool, CS3 allows you to rapidly put together standards compliant web sites and dynamic web sites with server-side languages and Ajax, and much more.

To complement this great new application, David Powers has written the ultimate guide to itThe Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 teaches you everything you need to know about the application, from setting up your development environment to publishing your sites and applications on the web, and everything in between.

Overview

Takes you through your development environment set up

Covers everything you need to create both standards compliant web sutes, and dynamic web applications
Teaches several real world techniques using a series of step by step tutorials

In this book, you'll learn how to:

set up your ideal development environment, using Mac OSX/Windows, Apache (and IIS on Windows,) Apache, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin
create standards compliant web sites using CS3's XHTML and CSS features
create dynamic web applications using CS3's PHP and Spry Ajax server behaviors
build several real world web site functions, such as form validation, random quote generator, search function, user management/login pages, dynamic Ajax gallery, and much more.
create an interface design in Fireworks CS3 and importing it into Dreamweaver CS3.
use Dreamweaver CS3's XML functionality, to consume RSS feeds, and create Spry data sets
use includes, templates and master detail pages
publish your site after you've created it

Summary of Contents

Chapter 1: Dreamweaver CS3Your Creative Partner
Chapter 2: Building Dynamic Sites with Ajax and PHP
Chapter 3: Getting the Work Environment Ready
Chapter 4: Setting Up a PHP Site
Chapter 5: Adding a Touch of Style
Chapter 6: Creating a CSS Site Straight Out of the Box
Chapter 7: Building Site Navigation with the Spry Menu Bar
Chapter 8: Sprucing Up Content with Spry Widgets
Chapter 9: Building Online Forms and Validating Input
Chapter 10: Introducing the Basics of PHP
Chapter 11: Using PHP to Process a Form
Chapter 12: Working with PHP Includes and Templates
Chapter 13: Setting Up MySQL and phpMyAdmin
Chapter 14: Storing Records in a Database
Chapter 15: Controlling Access to Your Site
Chapter 16: Working with Multiple Tables
Chapter 17: Searching Records and Handling Dates
Chapter 18: Using XSLT to Display Live News Feeds and XML
Chapter 19: Using Spry to Display XML
Chapter 20: Getting the Best of Both Worlds with PHP and Spry

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for those who are familiar with the basics of web development with an interest in PHP, CSS, Ajax and Spry (Adobe`s version of Ajax). It assumes that you know your way around Dreamweaver, but that you haven't developed database driven web applications before.

Conclusion

Author David Powers, a Dreamweaver and PHP expert, guides the intermediate or ambitious beginning Dreamweaver user through the powerful and intricate upgrades of the latest version of Adobe's Dreamweaver CS3, and then spices it up with the world's most popular open source scripting language, PHP.

Power's easy to read style keeps the tutorial like text moving along with pertinent information and many useful tips and techniques that will bring any Dreamweaver users skill level up a notch. All the scripts are available as a download so the reader can work right along with partially started examples to build an elegant and functional website using a combination of Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script and XML (AJAX).

Finally, Powers teaches some functional basic PHP lessons and shows the reader how to integrate this highly useful and popular scripting language into making the site even more functional using concise, real world examples.

Readers already familiar with the basics of Dreamweaver will benefit the most, although it is possible for a newbie to follow along thanks to Powers easy to understand style and directions, especially the PHP section, which is for beginners.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP book. The friendly people of friends of ED are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, download the sample PDF and finish the following sentence:

"The Spry menu bar is much more accessible than the old JavaScript pop-up menus, because..."

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Tuesday the 27th of November 2007. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.