Book Review: Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques
“Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos”, by David Karlins, is an excellent resource for web-designers, graphic designers and anyone who may be using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Whether you are an expert or a novice the reader will find a concise and easy to read breakdown of creating an effective web-site with several tips on how to do it more efficiently along the way.
With the importance of web sites for business use in today’s culture, everyone from the average person working for any business to more tech savvy professionals like graphic designers are finding themselves in the position of needing to have a website. For many, the option exists of assigning or hiring someone else to build such a site. But for many others, that option doesn’t as easily exist. So today people are learning how to build and maintain websites like never before. Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 is a web authoring tool designed to help web designers and developers create websites with a lot of handy features. Users can build sites in either a coding mode for those comfortable with writing straight HTML or CSS, or they can build with a Design mode for those more comfortable using a layout style interface. There is even a hybrid where you can code and view a preview at once.
But for many who are completely new to web design, using even Dreamweaver’s most basic features can be something of a daunting task. In his book, David Karlins sets out to break down 100 of the most common tasks users need to know how to accomplish with Dreamweaver, and explains them in a simple fashion. The book works well as a textbook to be read alone, as a guide to walk step-by step through each topic while working in Dreamweaver or even as a quick reference for designers and developers who simply need a desktop reference.
However, this is not just a book for current Dreamweaver users. This book is also suited well for somebody who has no prior experience with building websites but may desire to learn from scratch. Karlin’s writing style is very easy to read which is a treat since the nature of web design can get pretty confusing at times. This book is not heavy reading, so if you are considering getting into web design I would encourage you to pick up a copy.
