Introduction

Introduction
byGareth Downes-Powellet al.
Wrox Press 2003

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is a truly superb piece of software; it enables rapid and easy development of web applications. It is a great step forward from the previous incarnation of Dreamweaver, because it incorporates the server-side development tools previously found in Dreamweaver UltraDev, plus some new features, such as built-in support for PHP and better support for standards like XHTML and CSS.

PHP is a very popular server-side scripting language. It's fast, has plenty of hand built-in functionality, and, perhaps more importantly, is free. Most hosting companies offer PHP support, and there's a large community of PHP users on the Web ready to help out if you get stuck. The combination of Dreamweaver MX's visual interface and PHP's ease of use is a powerful one.

In this book we'll be looking at how to use Dreamweaver MX to produce PHP code. Throughout the book, we'll be building an example web application, a hotel booking system, which you can see in action at http://www.phpdreamweavermx.co.uk/.

We start off with some introductory chapters covering Dreamweaver MX and MySQL, the free database we'll be using for this book. We'll look at how databases work and cover a little SQL. We then move on to show how we designed the sample web application. The later chapters cover some more advanced topics, such as creating a search tool for your site, more advanced SQL, hand coding in Dreamweaver, and debugging your code. By the end of the book you should be skilled at using Dreamweaver MX to build PHP web sites.

This book doesn't aim to teach you in depth how to code PHP, but the hand-coding chapter has a small PHP syntax primer to get you up to speed.

For an in-depth look at the PHP language and syntax we recommend the Wrox books, Beginning PHP 4 by Chris Ullman et al (ISBN 1-861003-73-0) and Professional PHP 4 Programming by Luis Argerich et al (ISBN 1-861006-91-8)

Who's This Book for?

This book is for web professionals who want to learn how to use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX to produce database-driven PHP web applications quickly and with the minimum of fuss.

This assumes that the reader has some knowledge of HTML and web design concepts. It doesn't assume any knowledge of PHP, SQL, or databases.