Having been away from the web-building side of the internet for several years, I found myself having to become acquainted with Dreamweaver. I found this hefty, 936 page volume to be an easy-to-use, readable manual with plenty of illustrations, 12 hands-on tutorials, and a well-organized index.  Chapters are grouped into topic-oriented “parts.” Part I takes the reader through the steps of building a web page, from an introduction to Dreamweaver 8 to adding and modifying images on a web page. Part II moves on to more involved techniques such as Cascading Style Sheets, advanced page layouts, and working with actual coding. Part III covers the design and use of forms and interactive elements. Part IV pulls it all together to present the elements involved in building a web site. Part V digs a little deeper with snippets, libraries, and templates. Part VI covers the addition of dynamic features to a web page. I read the sections that pertained to my current project, selected other sections through the index, and  took a look at the tutorial sites on the internet.

The twelve tutorials are step-by-step exercises where the reader may download associated files from the internet and work on an actual application such as adding rollovers, authentication, connecting to databases, CSS, CSS layout, displaying database information, forms, inserting and updating data, snippets and Library items, tables, templates, and XSLT fragments.

This book was published in 2006, and Dreamweaver has moved on to a version 9 of its software, but the level at which this text presents the material makes the book something I will want to refer to as I upgrade my web site and gain a better understanding of all that Dreamweaver can do for me.