How This Book Is Organized

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Each of the book's 29 chapters contains explanatory text, lots of pictures, and several hands-on exercises. The chapters are grouped into six sections:

Part I: Web Page Construction with Dreamweaver

These chapters cover the nuts and bolts of creating web pages with Dreamweaver, including setting up the workspace, creating documents, working with text and images, setting up links and navigation systems, and adding head content. Just because these are fundamentals doesn't mean this section is only for beginners ! There's a lot to learn here about good, solid work skills for creating good foundation documents.

Part II: Designing with Dreamweaver

This section looks at Dreamweaver as a design tool. This includes creating good page layouts with tables and divs, using CSS, creating frame-based layouts, and designing forms. The focus is on creating attractive, functional, and communicative page designs, and on developing good coding skills to create well-structured pages that will display well across browsers and platforms.

Part III: Interactivity, DHTML, and Multimedia

Web pages don't have to be static. An important part of the web experience is interactivity, whether it's for user engagement, efficient presentation of information, or entertainment value. The chapters in this section examine all the tools for making things hop and pop, turning the static web experience into something interactive. This includes JavaScript behaviors, DHTML (what it is and how you can use it), and how to work beyond HTML with Flash and other rich media content.

Part IV: Site Management with Dreamweaver

No web page is an island. This section covers Dreamweaver as an organizational tool for working with the dozens or hundreds of files that comprise a website. This section covers creating a local site and taking advantage of Dreamweaver file-management resources, working with remote sites, and using Dreamweaver tools for team-based or large-scale web development.

Part V: Dreamweaver and Live Data

Dynamic data (referred to as live data in Dreamweaver) is the future of web development. Read this section of the book to improve the way you work with ASP.NET, ColdFusion, and PHP. We cover the basicssetting up sites, using live data objects, and understanding server behaviorsand then move on to pushing the envelope with the different server technologies.

Part VI: Dreamweaver Under the Hood

Think of this section as Dreamweaver for geeks . These chapters cover using Dreamweaver as a coding tool, customizing the Dreamweaver workspace, working with extensions and the Extension Manager, and, finally, using a bit of scripting to write your own extensions.

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