Dreamweaver 4 Magic with Cdrom
Authors: Al Sparber, Crag Foster, Gerry Jacobsen, Linda Rathgeber, Murray Summers
Venue:  (2001)

From the Book:Macromedia Dreamweaver has long been considered the leading visual web design tool for professionals...and rightly so. But Dreamweaver also empowers casual users with the tools necessary to produce professional-looking web sites, quickly and easily, without having to write a single line of source code. Dreamweaver 4 builds on the industry's most powerful toolset with a host of usability and productivity enhancements that raise the bar to new heights. Travel along with us as we take you to the cutting edge of 21st Century web design with a little Dreamweaver Magic. Who We Are: Our writers can truly be called a Dream team. Author Al Sparber is a founding partner of Project VII Development, a leading world-wide resource for Dreamweaver learning tools, and home to a delicious assortment of Dreamweaver extensions. Contributing author Gerry Jacobsen (Al's partner at PVII) is a JavaScript wizard. Also contributing to Magic are Macromedia Evangelists Craig Foster, Murray Summers, and Linda Rathgeber... pillars of the Dreamweaver-Fireworks online communities. Who You Are: You are someone who knows that Dreamweaver 4 is the ultimate visual web design tool and you want to explore the full breadth of its capabilities. We assume you are familiar with the Dreamweaver 4 interface and that you understand the basics; and that you are familiar with Dreamweaver's menus and panels; and that you know how to define a web site and install an extension. We also assume you are ready to take your web weaving to a new level! If, however, you are a Dreamweaver newbie, don't despair. Dreamweaver 4 Magic is a groundbreaking book that comes with a <drum roll> Technical Support Forum. Whoa! We are quite serious about making Dreamweaver 4 Magic an immersive experience built around an unprecedented support community where you can interact with fellow readers, as well as this book's authors, on a daily basis. What's in This Book: Dreamweaver 4 Magic is a project-based book. Each project is an entity unto itself, so feel free to start in the middle, at the end, or in that least likely of spots the beginning. Projects were picked using a very scientific method. We call it the ECYVF Test. Translated: Extremely Cool Yet Very Functional. There's a lot of DHTML stuff inside. But it all meets the ECYVF test. No gratuitous fluff for us. All DHTML had to meet another, equally stringent test. It had to work in all version 4 and higher browsers including Netscape 6 and Opera 5. The pressure nearly killed us, but we did it. And you'll love it! Each project is done with Dreamweaver visual tools. There is no manual coding required. If a technique required a special kind of javascript, we developed a Dreamweaver extension to automate the process. Project VII has created some very cool new Behaviors, Commands, and Objects to make this book's projects very special. We've got dropdown menus. Flyout menus. Scrolling layers inside stationary widgets. Sliding presentations. Framesets that don't look like framests. Form buttons that act like image buttons. Disjoint rollovers. Collapsible menus. Tree menus. A tabbed interface. A hierarchical jump menu. And a top secret CSS Themes Extension with an off-the-scale wow factor. But there's more... You'll learn a whole lot about advanced CSS and how to properly use that most powerful of Dreamweaver features: The Dream Template. We got so excited in writing the projects that we almost forgot the appendices. Rather than do a last minute emergency appendectomy, we cooked up some cool stuff for the back of the book. We've included a comprehensive list of Dreamweaver resources, a listing of our favorite extensions (with guest commentary from the developers), and a listing of really cool and inspirational sites made with Dreamweaver. The CD: The CD you get is no ordinary CD. It is structured as a web server would be. As you begin a project, you simply copy the appropriate project folder to your hard drive and use Dreamweaver's Site Manager to define the folder as a proper Dreamweaver site. All the necessary files you'll need to complete a project are contained therein. As a bonus, we've also included the fully editable Fireworks 4 image source files so that you can easily customize a project to your heart's content. Project folders each contain finshed_project sub-folders that hold finished versions of each project. The CD interface has a special Projects Viewer section that lets you view the finished projects in the comfort of your own browser! The CD also contains an Extensions folder with sub-folders for Actions, Commands, and Objects...all in Dreamweaver Exchange .MXP format for click-click easy installation. Most of the Extensions were developed specifically for the book's projects. Also included, are 30-day trial versions of Dreamweaver 4 and Fireworks 4. Our Assumptions as We Wrote This Book The Dreamweaver Community is a special place. Kind of like a small town that spans the globe. It's full of nice, friendly, helpful souls. We've been a part of that community for quite some time and it's helped us to formulate some educated assumptions about what would make for a successful Dreamweaver book. You Want Cutting Edge Stuff that is also Practical We've seen all the cutesy stuff in how-to books from a-z. You don't want to burden your web sites with one single line of code unless it is a functional enhancement. You want fully functioning and logically structured navigation systems that can manage a working web site you'll be proud of. You want usable DHTML that works in all modern browsers. You want cool stuff that works to make a visit to your site that much more enjoyable. You Want Visually Striking Design We were absolutely fanatical about the quality of the images used in our projects. Text and background contrast had to be just so. GIFs had to be perfectly blended into our pages. Clean and crisp was the order of the day, every day we worked on Dreamweaver Magic. So we assume, after all is said and done, that you really want a book like Dreamweaver 4 Magic! The Dreamweaver Magic Community: A Very special Place The real value of Dreamweaver lay in its wonderful and supportive community evident in Macromedia's Dreamweaver Newsgroup, Project VII's Dreamweaver-Design Pack Newsgroup, various mailing lists, and now... The PVII Webdev Newsgroup...a wonderful place to ask questions, get answers, and chat with the authors!