Category: WebDesignBookReview

Global Mobile: Connecting without Walls, Wires or Borders (Peachpit, 2005) by Fred Johnson is a small and basic guide to getting around with a laptop, cell phone or handheld device.

It is a handy guide for the uninitiated who want to take a laptop out of the home or office to an internet hotspot, want to travel abroad and use a cell phone, want to use text messaging from a phone, want to work on the road, or want to use Bluetooth.

It includes a few beyond-the-basics tips like how to create a wireless computer-to-computer network and how to connect a laptop to a cell phone for internet access using a cell phone. The appendices include GSM frequencies (for cell phone use abroad) by country, and telephone country codes.

This book can help you sort out what the technologies are and what equipment you need to get started with them.

Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver is the second Visual QuickProject I’ve seen from Peachpit Press. The author is Nolan Hester. Like the HTML Visual QuickProject I reviewed earlier, this book is stripped down to 125 pages, uses visuals as much as text to get the point across, and would enable a beginner to create a set of linked pages and get them up on the web.

These Visual QuickProjects aren’t meant to create power users, so they would not be suitable for a full semester text. They would be perfect for someone who simply wants a basic, non-commercial page, or for a class of only a few hours in a situation like continuing ed. I’ve seen high school courses where the students are expected to be exposed to Dreamweaver, some image editing program like Fireworks, Flash, a video editing program, and possibly even something like PowerPoint. These little books would be a good introduction to an application program in a class like that.

The QuickProject includes a few Dreamweaver interface basics, a few text formatting basics, images, tables, lists, links, library items, templates, and publication. The project uses CSS styles and CSS for layout with both external and embedded styles.

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Julian Rickards is the author of this volume in the Essentials for Design series published by Pearson Prentice Hall. I looked at Level One. There is also a Level Two book for Dreamweaver MX 2004 in the same series. Neither book is available yet, although the Level Two book is mentioned on amazon.com. Unfortunately, neither the Level One book nor amazon.com have a table of contents for Level Two. I wish I could see the contents for the next level, because that would make a difference in whether or not I would recommend teaching with this book.

I’ve been doing some writing for the Fireworks MX 2004 book in this series—just some suplemental materials, not the text. Because of that, I’ve looked really closely at the Fireworks book, too. The Fireworks book seems quite good to me, even though I’ve never taught Fireworks and don’t have so many opinions about how it should be taught as I do where Dreamweaver is concerned.

Pearson Prentice Hall is going all out to give teachers everything they could possibly need with this series. There are objectives for each lesson, extensive opportunities for evaluation and reinforcement, hands-on-projects in every chapter, and creative portfolio development for each project. Teachers are given a reference guide to the files on the CD, an Instructor’s Manual, and PowerPoint slides for each project. There is a test generating program and built-in integration with WebCT and Blackboard (with CourseCompass if wanted) and a training and assessment product called Train & Assess IT. The Essentials for Design series includes books for Illustrator CS, InDesign CS, Photoshop CS, Premiere Pro, QuarkXPress 6, XHTML, JavaScript, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, and Flash MX 2004.

To get specific about Essentials for Design: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, Level One, I both liked and didn’t like it. The book does a fine job of getting students off to a good start with Dreamweaver MX 2004 and many of the exercises and explanations are excellent.

The thing that bothers me as an advocate of integrating the CSS instruction into the development of everything else being taught is that much of the CSS seems to have been put off to Level Two. At least I hope things like exporting embedded style sheets to external CSS files and setting up font presention choices in the body style are covered in Level Two. I do like the fact that CSS is not ignored until the last minute, as in some books. Students begin writing styles using the Property Inspector very early in the book, but Level One never gets beyond what happens automatically via the Property Inspector. In the Tables chapter, it mentions that borders exist in CSS, but doesn’t explain how to use them. In the Frames chapter (which is top-notch at explaining how to make frames accessible!) it uses the Property inspector to embed styles in each individual document in the framed site without mentioning how much time and code could be saved with an external stylesheet. In the Images chapter (also very good from an overall standpoint) students use align attributes rather than learning about float.

Aside from my usual criticism about the lack of CSS integration from the first moment, this is a good book. I would not teach it without Level Two, whatever Level Two may contain, but it is a good start. Teachers who aren’t experts in Dreamweaver or aren’t familiar what happens in Code View will be well served by the exercises, the evaluation materials, and the creative projects. High school teachers may love it for the help with objectives, evaluation and hands-on project ideas, while college teachers may love it for the integration with WebCT and Blackboard.

Al Ward’s Photoshop Productivity Toolkit: Over 600 Time-Saving Actions (Sybex, 2004) is the second small book I’ve reviewed recently. By small, I mean it is just over 100 pages and very focused on a single idea: Photoshop actions. There are only four chapters. Ward explains what actions are, how to edit actions, how to create actions and then provides a boatload of actions you can use in myriad ways.

If you have never used actions in Photoshop, this book makes it easy to get started. Ward’s instructions are clear and easy to follow. He has you using the actions on the CD by Chapter 2 and by Chapter 3, you are in the actions business yourself.

Even if you already use your own Photoshop work flow and habits to create actions for yourself, you will probably find some interesting new actions on the CD, which includes actions for color correction, enhancement, production, typography and more.

I like this trend, if it is a trend, toward small, focused books that sell for under $25 and help readers master just one bit of information. They’re kind of like cable movies on demand–get the information you want when you want it without anything extraneous to clutter up the mental landscape. There is so much new information in web design–a constant pressure to learn more, more, more–that books helping you tame the one piece of knowledge that you need at the time seem like an excellent idea. In fact, I can think of a few topics I’d like to write about myself in one of these small tomes.

Peachpit Press has a new series called Visual QuickProject. Creating a Web Page with HTML by Elizabeth Castro is the first of the series I’ve seen. If the books are all this good, Peachpit Press has another hit series going.

This book, including all the appendices, is only 125 pages long. It is just two chapters in length, with full-color visuals that do a lot of the work of getting the message across. It would be an excellent book for a short class in a situation such as continuing education or a summer seminar or a training session of brief duration. While it is pared down to the minimum, it is also surprisingly complete, with good use of CSS and clever ways to pack in essential information. It even shows readers how to use basic image editing techniques and how to FTP. Quite an accomplishment in 125 pages.

The Project in this Visual QuickProject is to make two complete web pages with stylesheets linked to each one. Readers end up with two layouts that could be expanded and adapted for further use, and a good idea of what HTML and CSS are all about. If you are looking for something effective for a short class, this might be exactly the book for you.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Savvy by Christian Crumlish and Lucinda Dykes is another in the excellent Savvy series from Sybex. If you are teaching Dreamweaver with any other book, you should take a look at this book. It merits consideration.

There is enough material here for a full year. The book more or less falls into two equal parts, with the first part about Dreamweaver fundamentals from a design perspective and the second half about developing Web applications. That reads like a semester of learning the page building tools in Dreamweaver and a semester of learning the web application tools in Dreamweaver to me.

There are things in this book that students invariably want to know that I have not seen in any other book. For example, in Chapter 14: Collecting Information with Forms, the authors include instructions for editing the FormMail.pl script, for uploading it to the proper spot on a server, and for setting the permissions to make it execute. This chapter also explains using discussion boards, chat, and creating a blog.

The authors do an adequate job with CSS, although they overlooked the Insert Div tag capability in Dreamweaver MX 2004 that is so useful in structuring CSS layouts. They also do a bit more than the usual (the usual being almost nothing) with accessibility. If you are a regular reader of my reviews, you know that CSS and accessibility coverage are my personal make-or-break points in deciding whether a book is good enough.

In Part IV, Developing Web Applications, the authors devote four chapters to getting Dreamweaver set up to work with Web applications and explaining how to use databases. Then they devote individual chapters to the various technologies you can use to interact with the database such as Cold Fusion, ASP, .NET, PHP and JSP.

Part V deals with site administration and has some information that might be useful earlier in the book (or course) if you are imagining my two semester scenario for this text.

All in all, this book would definitely help you prepare students for the job market.