Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual
By David Sawyer McFarland
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)
Dreamweaver website development and management software has been around more than 14 years. This makes it almost ancient by software standards. Yet, with each new release, it keeps steadily evolving, improving and adding more features and capabilities. And it is well-supported and stable. So Dreamweaver remains one of the most popular and widely used packages for designing and managing high-quality websites.
One thing you still don’t get with the Dreamweaver software package, however, is a printed manual. So it remains a perfect candidate for O’Reilly Media’s popular “The Missing Manual” series.
This book’s author, David Sawyer McFarland, knows pretty much everything about Dreamweaver. He has been using it since 1998. And, with this new edition, he keeps alive his string of writing every Dreamweaver book in “The Missing Manual” series. (His previous edition, covering Dreamweaver CS5.5, is reviewed here.)
McFarland’s book shows you how to use Dreamweaver CS6 and how to create a basic website. From there, you learn how to improve, expand, add features, and enhance the usefulness and sophistication of your website. You also learn how to use the built-in tools to manage what you have created.
Here is what’s new in Dreamweaver CS6:
- Basic support for HTML5, including HTML5 tags and code-hinting.
- Support for CSS3, including code-hinting and adding numerous CSS3 properties to the CSS Styles panel. Dreamweaver CS6 also has a new CSS3 web fonts manager that expands font choices. And its new CSS transitions panel “lets you easily add animations to mouse rollovers, so you can turn a navigation bar into an animated visual delight.”
- More web design support for mobile browsers, including a new “‘fluid grid layout’ tool that lets you build designs that re-flow content to match different devices….”
- More support for jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap—“two programming technologies that let you build mobile phone applications using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”
Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual is organized as follows:
- Introduction
- Part One: Building a Web Page
- Chapter 1: Dreamweaver CS6 Guided Tour
- Chapter 2: Adding and Formatting Text
- Chapter 3: Introducing Cascading Style Sheets
- Chapter 4: Links
- Chapter 5: Images
- Chapter 6: Tables
- Chapter 7: HTML: Under the Hood
- Part Two: Building a Better Web Page
- Chapter 8: Advanced CSS
- Chapter 9: Page Layout
- Chapter 10: Troubleshooting CSS
- Chapter 11: Designing Websites for Mobile Devices
- Part Three: Bringing Your Pages to Life
- Chapter 12: Forms
- Chapter 13: Adding Interactivity with JavaScript
- Chapter 14: Add Flash and Other Multimedia
- Part Four: Managing a Website
- Chapter 15: Introducing Site Management
- Chapter 16: Testing Your Site
- Chapter 17: Moving Your Site to the Internet
- Part Five: Dreamweaver CS6 Power
- Chapter 18: Snippets and Libraries
- Chapter 19: Templates
- Chapter 20: Find and Replace
- Chapter 21: Customizing Dreamweaver
- Chapter 22: Working with Server-Side Programming
- Appendix A: Getting Help
- Appendix B: Dreamweaver CS6, Menu by Menu
- Index (46 pages)
As usual, a CD is not included with this book. But “every single Web address, practice file, and piece of downloadable software mention in this book is available at www.missingmanual.com (click the Missing CD icon.)”
Whether you are an absolute newcomer or an old hand at using Dreamweaver, you can benefit by having and using this hefty how-to book.
—Si Dunn
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