Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3

The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

Tired of books that seem like a rehash of the help files? Fed up with trivial examples that have no relevance to the real world of website development? Want to get the best out of Dreamweaver CS3 and build dynamic, data-driven websites with Ajax and PHP? Then this is the book for you.

After a general introduction to the main features of Dreamweaver CS3, including Adobe Bridge and Device Central, you’re taken on an in-depth exploration of three areas vital to the creation of standards-compliant dynamic websites:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the look of your pages
Spry, Adobe’s Ajax framework, for pages that respond more smoothly to user interaction
PHP, the open source server-side language, to send email and communicate with data sources

David leaves no stone unturned in his quest to provide the best instructional material on the shelves today.

Tom Muck

This book explains everything in clear, everyday language. As long as you have an understanding of the basic principles of (X)HTML and CSS, you should be building interactive websites in no time at all.

You’ll learn how to work efficiently with the CSS Styles panel and avoid littering your pages with meaningless classes. You’ll be guided through the maze of CSS style rules that play an essential role in the new Spry menu bar, accordion, tabbed and collapsible panels, and validation widgets.

Detailed instructions show you how to set up a testing environment for PHP and the MySQL database on both Windows and Mac OS X. You’ll learn how to create a secure script to send email from an online form and store the information in a database.

Want more? This book also covers the principles of good database design and introduces you to practical applications with XML, such as consuming a remote news feed and building an online photo gallery.

The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 pulls no punches about the accessibility problems inherent in all Ajax frameworks, including Spry, but shows you how to create sites that remain accessible and search-engine friendly by integrating Spry into PHP pages. The PHP chapters expand and considerably improve material from highly successful Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 (friends of ED, 2005).