Dreamweaver 8 Recipes Book Review

Ok, before I get into this review, I want to clarify something. This is a really good book. The reason that I say this is because I have a lot of complaints about database driven websites (at least creating them, not the way they run) My complaints are not with the authors of this book, they did the best they could. Part of the problem is my lack of knowledge and part of the problem is that there are too many ways to create a database driven dynamic website, some have standards, and some don’t.

This book starts off with the simple things that you need to know, but by part 2 of this book, you better have some web design experience or you are going to be lost. This is not the authors fault, they made things as simple as possible, the fact is, there is nothing simple about the subject of this book

There are a lot of good programs included with the book that you can easily adapt into your own website applications, this is helpful since this is a really complicated thing anyway.

I’m going to jump up on my podium here and say “how about some people get together and let’s make some standards. Standards that can be used with PHP, ASP (whether JavaScript or VBScript) and ColdFusion. The authors did a really good job when explaining the differences between the good and bad of each language so you could weigh out each of the options yourself, but a lot of this book contains things like, “ASP and ColdFusion will do this automatically, but if you are using PHP, then you have to do this…” It makes reading the book a little complicated, but all in all, if you are going to get into database driven websites, this is a book to have, know and understand!

The people from http://www.webassist.com did a great job helping write the code for this book.