This set of materials is about 4 hours of training, created by Garrick Chow. The lessons are divided into 12 areas: Getting Started; Exploring the Interface; Managing Your Sites; Learning the Basics; Linking; Working with Cascading Style Sheets; Working with Typography; Working with Tables; Using Layout Tools; Designing for Devices; Working with Rollover Images; and Publishing Your Site.  Although videos are the heart of this “book,” there is a small printed reference guide (167 pages) which briefly highlights selected points for each section. However, the manual will not replace the videos. Included in this collection are exercise files, which are the files used in the video demonstrations.

These video lessons are also found on lynda.com but this collection allows you to use the materials without paying for the connect time to Lynda Weinman’s site or without having an Internet connection (or should I say a fast Internet connection, which posted videos often require).  All of these videos are QuickTime so that player must be installed on your computer.  An important thing to keep in mind if you purchase this video collection is that the videos will not run if copied to your hard drive, but must be played from the CD drive on your computer.  The exercise files can be opened and used if copied to your hard drive.

As the title implies, these lessons are primarily aimed at a new user of Dreamweaver. Filmed with CS3, there are comments periodically in the videos if something “different” is available in this release of Dreamweaver, for example the option to preview web pages in various devices (hand held devices primarily).

I think these videos would be very useful to anyone starting Dreamweaver. One of the topics which typically confronts and confuses a new user is defining a remote server, and, of course, no single explanation can solve this problem, since servers are set up differently. This resource describes setting up a Tripod account (which is free), to give people an option to post files, if they do not have an established server already.

As someone who has taught Dreamweaver for several years, I still found things in this material that I had not used or used minimally (for example, changing the docking of panels, creating a site map, using a tracing image, using AP div areas for placing items on a specific part of a page,  creating a disjointed rollover, and creating a navigation bar with images). Because of these “intermediary topics” these videos would further stretch the new user to tackle more than just basic text, links, images and tables.

I thought the introduction to cascading style sheets as they can be created in Dreamweaver was very good, so this resource would be useful to someone who had a basic understanding of Dreamweaver but still felt “fizzy” when dealing with CSS. There is not a lot of detail about doing a layout using CSS, but this video series is aimed at new users. I was happy, however, that the instructor included a video about creating a printer-friendly style sheet, and illustrated in a few steps some practical reasons to take the extra steps needed to create a screen versus a print style sheet.