Resources
Web Sites
This should be your first stop when looking for answers to
a Dreamweaver question (after this book, of course!). This site allows you
to search Dreamweaver’s LiveDocs (online manual) and the Product Support
Knowledge Base.
This is the place to go when you’re looking for Dreamweaver
add-ons and extensions. At press time, there were more than a thousand items
for download.
Once you go to the link above, click the link for the Dreamweaver
category. This site is an aggregator site that lists posts from many people’s
Dreamweaver-related weblogs.
It’s a great way to keep up with the Dreamweaver community.
This
site has tutorials and sample files focused on the new features of Dreamweaver
CS3, and articles that will help you better use Dreamweaver to build your
sites.
Project Seven is one of the premier developers of Dreamweaver
extensions and page templates.
Their Pop Menu Magic extension helps you build extensive pop-up navigation
menus for your site with almost no effort. And their PagePacks are collections
of great-looking page layouts with an interface that lets you easily add
those pages to your site.Besides the paid products, the Project Seven site also contains
many tutorials covering CSS, images, navigation, and more.
Tons of constantly updated content, page templates, tutorials,
and extensions, are available on a subscription basis at Community MX.
Subscribers get the content at no extra charge; non-subscribers can purchase
items à la carte;
everyone can sign up for a free trial. The site also has support forums for
subscribers, where the site partners guarantee a timely, useful response.
A List Apart is not Dreamweaver-specific, but it’s essential
reading nonetheless. This Web magazine has been around since 1998, and is
still an invaluable resource for people who make Web sites.
You’ll find great,
well-written articles on virtually all aspects of building sites. Now, go
check it out.
Other Online Resources
You can find interesting and useful help with Dreamweaver and
Web sites in general if you go beyond just Web sites.
Adobe (under the old Macromedia name) has a lively newsgroup
for Dreamweaver users that gets many messages every day. You’ll need
a Usenet newsreader program to access this forum. Good ones are Microsoft
Outlook or Outlook Express on Windows, or Microsoft Entourage or Panic Software’s
Unison on the Mac. Or, just send your browser to http://groups.google.com/group/macromedia.dreamweaver.
Wise-Women is an online community, with a Web site and an email
discussion list.
The purpose of the list is to provide women on the Web with a supportive
atmosphere to deal with issues of Web development, design and consulting.
Wise-Women was founded in 1999 by one of the authors of this book (Dori),
and is going strong today. You’ll find lots of useful information on
the mailing list about using Dreamweaver, among many other subjects. And
in case you’re wondering, the community is not just for women only.
If you’re more of a visual learner, Lynda.com offers
an excellent series of video training programs that cover Dreamweaver and
the rest of the Adobe product line, as well as many other software packages. You can
purchase these training programs as CD-ROMs that you can view on your computer,
or you can access the videos over the Internet through their Online Training
Library, for which you’ll need to purchase a subscription. One of us
(Tom) produced Contribute 3 Essential Training for Lynda.com,
and the other (Dori) produced JavaScript Essential Training.
Other Dreamweaver Books
Though the authors would naturally like to think that the book
you’ve got in your hands is all you’ll ever need to become a
Dreamweaver expert, we recognize that you might just want a bit more information
after you’ve completely devoured this book. There are approximately
a million different Dreamweaver books on the market; here are some of the
books we think are the best.
Written by Jeffrey Bardzell and Bob Flynn and published by
Adobe Press, this book covers many of the aspects of Dreamweaver that aren’t
covered in the book you have in your hands. You’ll find information
on working with servers, setting up database connections, using SQL, and
building database-backed Web sites with dynamic pages.
Joseph Lowery is well known in the Dreamweaver community, and
this massive Dreamweaver reference, published by Wiley, shows why. At a whopping
1,200 pages, we think this is perhaps the best comprehensive Dreamweaver
reference book available.
Web Design and JavaScript Books
After our last edition of this book, we got email from readers
asking for our suggestions for books about JavaScript and Web design. There
are too many books to count about these subjects, so here are some of our
favorites.
Written by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith (hey, that’s us!),
this best-selling JavaScript book is a great introduction to the JavaScript
language. When you want to find out more about using JavaScript than you
can achieve by using Dreamweaver’s behaviors and Spry widgets, our
book is a good start.
This book by Charles Wyke-Smith, published by New Riders Press,
teaches you how to use CSS to style text and create page layouts, as well
as create user interface components. It makes good use of case studies to
not just tell you how things are done, but why you should do them that way,
all delivered in an easy to understand style.
Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the earliest and strongest voices
evangelizing Web standards, and this book for designers explains the gospel
to designers in familiar terms that they understand. This book is best for
readers that are already familiar with using CSS to build Web sites. It’s
another book from New Riders Press.
This is another beyond-the-basics book, written by Andy Clarke
and Molly E. Holzschlag. Both authors have been involved with Web standards
for many years (they and Zeldman have been long-time leaders of the Web Standards
Project, www.webstandards.org),
and they bring that cross-platform, cross-browser sensibility to the problem
of designing Web sites. This is a book for designers who want to learn how
to use CSS to create beautiful sites with exceptional design.
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