Beginning Dreamweaver MX

Book excerpt: What is this book about? With this book you'll quickly be creating powerful, dynamic web sites with Dreamweaver MX - the latest version of Macromedia's powerful, integrated web development and editing tool. You'll learn how to use the tools and features of Dreamweaver to construct three complete sites using HTML, JavaScript, Active Server Pages (ASP), and databases. We start by creating a hobbyist site - The Cooking Place - that you can use to list your favorite recipes, ingredients, and dishes. What does this book cover? As you build this site you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver MX to Plan, create, and set up a web site Add web pages to the site and edit their content Use Stylesheets and templates to create a consistent style across the site Use tables, frames, and layers to lay out web pages Add dynamic effects - like drop down menus - to web pages using JavaScript and DHTML Interact with users via forms on web pages Create dynamic ASP web pages to respond to user actions and input As you progress through the book, the sites you create become ever more ambitious. The second site you build is a fan site for soccer that provides information on upcoming events for fans around the world. As you build the second site you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver MX to: Add logic to your ASP pages, so that you can display different information to different users, based on their location, or even the time of day Keep track of users as they move around the site, so that you can learn what parts of your site are the most popular Secure parts of the web site so that only authorized users are allowed to see sensitive information Personalize the web site for individual users - so that the site appears in the colors of the user's favorite team or so that the user only sees events in their home country Store and extract information about users and upcoming events in a database - and use this information to dynamically create web pages The final site in the book shows off many of the advanced features of Dreamweaver MX, as you walk through how to design a modular, extensible, and scalable site, and create a set of dynamic building blocks that can be quickly modified and reused in different sites. As you build this site - which is used to display a set of images that users can view and purchase - you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver MX to: Create a set of building blocks whose look and content is determined dynamically by the settings in a database Create a content management page that you can use to mange the database that stores information about the images on the site, including their title, price, and how they should be laid out Put the building blocks you created earlier to a variety of uses, including a news blogger, a media display, and a product display Use Dreamweaver Extensions to make our building blocks easy to reuse and to add e-commerce functionality to the site At the end of some of the chapters you'll find a series of suggested exercises from the author that are designed to test your understanding of what's been covered in the chapter as well as to encourage you to experiment with the features of Dreamweaver MX and to modify and extend the example applications. Who is this book for? This book is primarily for complete beginners to web site programming who have access to Dreamweaver MX and want to learn how to create dynamic web sites with it. But the book doubles as a comprehensive reference to the features of Dreamweaver MX, so it will also be a useful resource to more experienced web developers who want to learn how to use the latest version of Dreamweaver. As you work through the book, you'll learn how to program using Active Server Pages (ASP), but this will prove useful even if you eventually want to use Dreamweaver MX to create web sites with JavaServer Pages (JSP), ASP.NET, PHP, or ColdFusion MX. Programming in any of these languages is very similar in Dreamweaver MX, and the core concepts you learn in building web sites with ASP are applicable and easily transferred to other languages. To help, the book includes four appendices that provide fast paced guides on how to get started using JSP, ASP.NET, PHP, and ColdFusion MX with Dreamweaver MX. What do you need to use this book? To run the examples in this book on your computer you'll need: Dreamweaver MX Microsoft Windows 98, 98SE, 2000 or XP Professional If you don't have a copy of Dreamweaver MX you can download a 30-day evaluation edition from Macromedia at http://www.macromedia.com/software/trial_download/. The evaluation edition is fully-featured, and you'll be able to use it to work through all the examples in the book. If you have Microsoft Windows Me, Windows XP Home Edition, or a Macintosh you'll still be able to create all the examples in the book but to see them in action you'll need to use a remote server, as your operating system doesn't, by default, include a web server that can process ASP pages. Fortunately, getting access to an ASP web host is easy -- there are dozens available. And to make things even easier, the book includes detailed information on how to set up a web application to use a remote server or web host.