Useful Books and Software

Enter Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual, the completely revised fourth edition of this bestselling book by experienced web site trainer, Macromedia Certified instructor, and Dreamweaver Advisory Council member David McFarland. This book enables both first-time and experienced web designers to create visually stunning and highly interactive web sites.

With crystal-clear writing and much welcome humor, this new edition offers features such as:

• Live examples: With McFarland's step-by-step annotated tutorials, you'll learn how to construct a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with working forms, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and dynamic databases.
• Tricks of the trade: The book is bursting with undocumented workarounds and shortcuts for easing the process of building, maintaining, and updating professional web sites.
• Design guidance: You'll learn to create virtually every modern web feature, including forms, animations, cascading menus, and more--and you'll find out which browsers you need to provide special coding or do extra testing with.

No matter what your level of expertise is, you'll also learn how to manage your entire web site-whether you've just launched or if it's been around for awhile and takes up thousands of pages. Beginners with no web design experience will appreciate the step-by-step guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying a web site; long-time Dreamweaver users will appreciate the advanced, real-world techniques for controlling the appearance of their web pages with CSS.

With more than 500 illustrations, a handcrafted index, and the clarity of thought that has made bestsellers of every Missing Manual to date, this is the ultimate atlas for the complex and powerful Dreamweaver 8.

New Price: $24.95 / Used Price: $18.42

• How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
• Everything you need to know about web standards -- (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
• Cascading Style Sheets -- formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
• All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
• The site development process, from start to finish
• Getting your pages on the Web -- hosting, domain names, and FTP

New Price: $25.68 / Used Price: $24.00

For the most part, however, this book addresses just those aspects of Web design that readers will need to know in order to successfully utilize the templates. These are designed as "mortised" sites; that is, they are built with nested tables and sliced GIF/JPEG combinations, the kind of design made easy with the advent of Adobe's ImageReady and Macromedia's Fireworks. Although this is not a how-to about using those applications or about creating such sites from scratch, Eccher does help readers learn how to debug and otherwise adjust the source code in order to successfully implement the designs. In addition to trial versions of the major applications, the CD-ROM also contains the JavaScript Cookbook and HTML/CSS Developer's Resource Guide, which provide lots of cut-and-paste source code for all kinds of features (games, sounds, pop-up messages) that can be added to a Web page.

One caveat: despite the templates, this book is too detailed for beginners. For those with some experience, and especially for developers who lack design skills and like the A5design style, this book amounts to an intensive Clint Eccher brain-picking seminar. He offers a few tricks that can be applied to any design (like his tips on how to drastically reduce file sizes) and some good general advice (for example, "Do not get attached to the work" because a client may just decide against it). --Angelynn Grant

Publisher: Charles River Media
Author: Clint Eccher
Release Date: 2008-04-02
ISBN/EAN: 1584505672 / 9781584505679

New Price: $28.52 / Used Price: $21.50

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are one of the most important technologies on the web today. They give web developers the power to style their web sites so those sites are usable, compact, good looking, consistently displayable, and quick and efficient to change if so desired.

There are many books out there on CSS, but Beginning CSS Web Development is different—it doesnt waste time discussing theory, and it delves straight into the practical matter. It provides you with what you need to know, faster. It is also completely up to date, covering the most modern CSS standards and design techniques.

In addition to the essential CSS basics, this book covers advanced techniques like accessibility, hacks, and filters. The book concludes with a case study, and features a CSS reference section that allows you to look up required syntax as quickly as possible.

Summary of Contents

• PART 1 - Get to Know CSS
  • Getting Started
  • Core Concepts of CSS
  • CSS Building Blocks
  • Text
  • Color, Backgrounds, and Images
  • Lists
  • Links
  • Tables and Definition Lists
  • Forms
• PART 2 - Logical Layouts
  • Layout Basics
  • Classic Layouts
  • Layout Manipulation
  • The Journey from Layout to Template
  • Usability and Accessibility Enhancements
  • Tips, Tricks, and Troubles
  • Case Study: The Dead Goods
  • CSS Reference

New Price: $22.00 / Used Price: $22.95

• Live examples. With a step-by-step annotated tutorial, readers follow the construction of a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with Flash buttons, Cascading Style Sheets, and dynamic databases.
• Tricks of the trade. The book is bursting with undocumented workarounds and shortcuts.
• Design guidance. Readers can create any modern web feature, including forms, animations, pop-up windows, and more. This book lets you know which browsers, situations, and audiences are appropriate for each.

David McFarland wrote this book, but the influence of esteemed series editor David Pogue is obvious in the careful coverage of features and frequent touches of humor (books about applications can be whangingly dull; the books in Pogue's Missing Manual series consistently manage to avoid this problem while maintaining comprehensiveness). The two men treat Dreamweaver's numerous features (and the even more numerous ways of putting them to use) cleverly, with a combination of procedures and side information that clarifies many oddball situations as well as straightforward conditions. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to create HTML (XHTML and CSS, strictly speaking) documents using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. In addition to the basic stuff (text, images, links, and frames), the book shows you how to build forms for data submission and embed Flash movies and Java applets. There's also a lot of helpful emphasis on Dreamweaver's productivity features, like snippet libraries and file transfer utilities. A special section shows you how to do some server-side work with databases.

Publisher: Pogue Press
Author: David Sawyer McFarland
Release Date: 2003-12-01
ISBN/EAN: 0596006314 / 9780596006310

New Price: $6.55 / Used Price: $2.03

Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document's structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time -- you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.

CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more. Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You'll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS.

The 3rd edition contains: Updates to reflect changes in the latest draft version of CSS 2.1 Browser notes updated to reflect changes between IE6 and IE7 Advanced selectors supported in IE7 and other major browsers included A new round of technicaledits by a fresh set of editors Clarifications and corrected errata, including updated URLs of referenced online resources

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Author: Eric Meyer
Release Date: 2006-11-07
ISBN/EAN: 0596527330 / 9780596527334

New Price: $25.66 / Used Price: $19.99

• Working with interactive forms and style sheets
• Presenting user-friendly page navigation
• Creating dynamic content
• Producing visual effects for stationary content
• Positioning HTML elements
• Managing browser windows and multiple frames

New Price: $8.00 / Used Price: $1.75

New Price: $8.99 / Used Price: $1.64

Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is a reference book and a cookbook on how to style web pages using CSS and XHTML. It contains 350 ready–to–use patterns (CSS and XHTML code snippets) you can copy and paste into your code. Each pattern can be combined with other patterns to create an unlimited number of solutions.

Each pattern works reliably in all major browsers without the need for browser hacks.

The book shows how to

• Code CSS and XHTML
• Turn HTML into XHTML
• Use CSS Selectors
• Use six CSS Box Models
• Create rounded corners, shadows, gradients, sprites, and transparency
• Replace text with images without affecting accessibility
• Style text with fonts, highlights, decorations, and shadows
• Create flexible, fluid layouts
• Position elements with absolute pixel precision
• Stack elements in layers
• Size, stretch, shrinkwrap, indent, align, and offset elements
• Style tables with borders and alternating striped rows
• Size table columns automatically
• Integrate CSS and JavaScript without embedding JavaScript in XHTML
• Create drop caps, callouts, quotes, and alerts

The book’s layout, with a pattern’s example on the left page and its explanation on the right, makes it easy to find a pattern and study it without having to flip between pages. The book is also readable from cover to cover, with topics building carefully upon previous topics.

A software developer can use this book to learn CSS for the first time. A designer familiar with CSS can use this book to master CSS and XHTML. If you are completely new to coding or completely new to CSS and XHTML, you may want to read an introductory book on CSS and XHTML first.

You can interact with all the examples in the book at www.cssDesignPatterns.com.

New Price: $26.72 / Used Price: n.a.

• Everything from planning to launching. From picking and buying a domain name, choosing a Web hosting firm, building your site, and uploading the files to a web server, this book teaches you the nitty-gritty of creating your home on the Web.



• Ready-to-use building blocks. Creating your own website doesn't mean you have to build everything from scratch. You'll learn how to incorporate loads of pre-built and freely available tools like interactive menus, PayPal shopping carts, Google ads, and Google Analytics.



• The modern Web. Today's best looking sites use powerful tools like Cascading Style Sheets (for sophisticated page layout), JavaScript (for rollover buttons and cascading menus), and video. This book doesn't treat these topics as fancy frills. From step one, you'll learn easy ways to create a powerful site with these tools.



• Blogs. Learn the basics behind the Web's most popular form of self-expression. And take a step-by-step tour through Blogger, the Google-run blogging service that will have you blogging before you close this book.

This isn't just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a website. Creating Websites: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide you need to make your ideas and vision a web reality.

Publisher: Pogue Press
Author: Matthew MacDonald
Release Date: 2008-12-15
ISBN/EAN: 0596520972 / 9780596520977

New Price: $19.79 / Used Price: n.a.