What’s in a name? In the case of Adobe’s Dreamweaver, you find one of the most appropriate product names around. Web page design is a blend of art and craft; whether you’re a deadline-driven professional or a vision-filled amateur, Dreamweaver provides an intuitive way to make your Web visions a reality. Dreamweaver implies development, and it excels at producing multifaceted Web pages that bring content locked in a data store to the surface.
Dreamweaver CS4 stands at the center of a complex series of overlapping worlds. In one realm, designers of static Web pages are looking to expand their knowledge base into data-driven sites. Over there, you’ll find application developers—some savvy in Active Server Pages, some in Cold-Fusion, and others in PHP—anxious to develop for the Internet. The spectrum of experience in both camps runs the gamut from eager novice to experienced professional, all of whom benefit from the advanced style capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There’s yet another group of prospective Web craftsmen and artists who want to do it all and are looking for a place to start. Dreamweaver CS4 is the one program robust enough for them all, and the Dreamweaver CS4 Bible is your guidebook to all its features and capabilities.
To use this book, you need only two items: the Dreamweaver software and a desire to make cutting-edge Web pages. (If you don’t have Dreamweaver, you can download a trial copy from www.adobe.com.) From quick design prototyping to ongoing Web site management, Dreamweaver automates and simplifies much of a Webmaster’s workload. Dreamweaver is not only the first Web authoring tool to bring the ease of visual editing to an HTML-code–oriented world, it also brings a point-and-click interface to complex coding whether server-side or client-side. The Dreamweaver CS4 Bible is designed to help you master every nuance of the program. Are you styling your pages and creating your layouts with CSS? Are you building multipage Web applications? Are you creating a straightforward layout with the visual editor? Do you need to extend Dreamweaver’s capabilities by building your own custom objects? With Dreamweaver and this book, you can weave your dreams into reality for the entire world to experience.
