With the release of Adobe Creative Suite CS4, Dreamweaver solidifies its role as the de facto tool of choice for anyone using Photoshop and designing for the Web. Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide uses a combination of task-based instruction and strong visuals to teach beginning and intermediate users how to create, design, and publish powerful, innovative Web sites with Dreamweaver. Leading technology authors Tom Negrino and Dori Smith take readers step-by-step through the new features in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, with completely revised chapters on critical tools like linking and including images and Flash animations. They also cover improvements to using styles and CSS in Dreamweaver, and the new Code Navigator in Dreamweaver CS4. Beginning users will learn to create their first Web site, add text, style and position page content, manage styles, work with links, incorporate images, media, tables, forms, and frames, design site navigation, and so much more. Experienced users will find this a convenient reference to the new features of Dreamweaver CS4.

About the Author

Tom Negrino is the author of dozens of books, including Visual QuickStart Guides covering Contribute and Keynote, and Visual QuickProject Guides on PowerPoint, Keynote, and Quicken. Dori Smith is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, publisher of the Wise-Women’s Web community, and a member of the Web Standards Project. Together they’ve written the best-selling JavaScript and Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, several editions of this book, and numerous print and online articles, and they publish the Backup Brain blog.

Dreamweaver CS4 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide

If you know HTML, this guide will have you building interactive websites quickly. You’ll learn how to create responsive, data-driven websites with PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript, regardless of whether you already know how to program. Discover how the powerful combination of PHP and MySQL provides an easy way to build modern websites complete with dynamic data and user interaction. You’ll also learn how to add JavaScript to create rich Internet applications and websites.

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript explains each technology separately, shows you how to combine them, and introduces valuable web programming concepts, including objects, XHTML, cookies, and session management. You’ll practice what you’ve learned with review questions in each chapter, and find a sample social networking platform built with the elements introduced in this book.

This book will help you:

* Understand PHP essentials and the basics of object-oriented programming

* Master MySQL, from database structure to complex queries

* Create web pages with PHP and MySQL by integrating forms and other HTML features

* Learn about JavaScript, from functions and event handling to accessing the Document Object Model

* Use libraries and packages, including the Smarty web template system, PEAR program repository, and the Yahoo! User Interface Library

* Make Ajax calls and turn your website into a highly dynamic environment

* Upload and manipulate files and images, validate user input, and secure your applications

About the Author

Robin Nixon has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s (his first computer was a Tandy TRS 80 Model 1 with a massive 4KB of RAM!). One of the web sites he developed presented the world’s first radio station licensed by the music copyright holders. In order to enable people to continue to surf while listening, Robin also developed the first known pop-up windows. He has also worked full time for one of Britain’s main IT magazine publishers, where he held several roles including editorial, promotions, and cover disc editing.

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

Get everything you need to plan and launch a web site, including detailed instructions and clear-headed advice on ready-to-use building blocks, powerful tools like CSS and JavaScript, and Google’s Blogger. The thoroughly revised, completely updated new edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual explains how to get your site up and running quickly and correctly.

These days, aspiring Web site creators like you pick up a lot of Web-design theory before you start working on your pages. But as deadlines loom and the value of “do it right” falls victim to the imperative to “do it right now,” even the best of us sometimes toss good practice out the window. That’s perfectly understandable and no cause for panic—after all, if Web weavers waited until their pages were perfect before uploading them, the Internet would be a very lonely place indeed. However, sometimes innocent-seeming shortcuts can cause headaches later on. Here are a few pieces of Web advice that site creators ignore at their own risk:

1. Always include a doctype.
Web browsers can translate two languages into Web pages: old-school HTML and today’s XHTML. You have to tell the browser which language (called markup) you use, and you do that with a document type definition, better known as a doctype. Doctype is arcane code that looks like this:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

If you forget to include a doctype, your pages will appear annoyingly inconsistent. That’s because some browsers, including Internet Explorer, switch into a backward-compatibility state known as quirks mode when they encounter unidentified markup; in essence, they attempt to act like an outdated browser from the 1990s. Common problems that result include text that appears at different sizes in different browsers and layouts that wind up in different configurations depending on your browser.

2. Keep formatting instructions out of your markup.
In a rush, it’s easy to get lazy and apply inline styles (or even worse, formatting tags like < font > ) to a page’s XHTML or HTML. But it’s rare for a web site creator to use a particular format just once. Most often, you’ll use a design–say for a column, heading, or note box–elsewhere on the same page or on another of your site pages. To ensure consistency across your site and to make it easier to fine-tune the look and feel of your pages, move all your formatting instructions to a central location: an external style sheet. That way, when a browser processes a page, it grabs this central set of instructions and applies them to the page.

3. Be under renovation, not under construction.
Think of your favorite store. Now imagine shopping there if you had to wander around half-lit floors while dodging ladders, pylons, and heavy-duty construction equipment to find the aisles that still have products on the shelf.

It’s a similar story on the Web, where a site with empty pages, “under construction” messages, and vague promises of upcoming content will send visitors away in droves. Yes, it’s true that your Web site won’t be complete when you first upload it. But make sure that what’s there is genuinely useful on its own, and don’t draw attention to gaps and shortcomings. Instead, keep improving what you’ve got.

4. Think twice before you adopt copy-and-paste design.

Typically, Web sites use the same page design across all their pages. For example, noodle around Amazon and you’ll always see a menu header at the top of the page and a sidebar on the left.

There’s a very special circle in Dante’s Inferno reserved for Web developers who try to achieve consistent design by copying and pasting their XHTML from one page to another. It’s almost impossible to manage or modify this mess across all your pages without making a mistake, even if you have a small Web site.
If you need a repeating page design, pick a suitable solution from the available options, each of which comes with its own caveat. You can use server-side includes (which require Web host support), page templates (provided you have a Web design tool like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web), frames (which can exhibit quirks), or a Web development platform (if you’re willing to take a crash course in programming).

5. Keep an eye on your visitors.
Is anyone here? There’s no point in having a Web site if you’re not willing to pay attention to what content draws and keeps visitors and what falls flat on its face. Remarkably, the best way to do that is with a free yet industrial-strength service called Google Analytics. You simply copy a small bit of tracking code to each of your pages and within hours you’ll be able to answer questions like “Where do my visitors live?”, “How long is a typical visit?”, and “What pages are their favorites?

Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. If you want to create an engaging web site, this thoroughly revised, completely updated edition of Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for developing a professional and reliable web presence.

Whether you want to build a personal web site, an e-commerce site, a blog, or a web site for a specific occasion or promotion, this book gives you detailed instructions and clear-headed advice for:

* Everything from planning to launching. From picking and buying a domain name, choosing a Web hosting firm, building your site, and uploading the files to a web server, this book teaches you the nitty-gritty of creating your home on the Web.

* Ready-to-use building blocks. Creating your own web site doesn’t mean you have to build everything from scratch. You’ll learn how to incorporate loads of pre-built and freely available tools like interactive menus, PayPal shopping carts, Google ads, and Google Analytics.

* The modern Web. Today’s best looking sites use powerful tools like Cascading Style Sheets (for sophisticated page layout), JavaScript (for rollover buttons and cascading menus), and video. This book doesn’t treat these topics as fancy frills. From step one, you’ll learn easy ways to create a powerful site with these tools.

* Blogs. Learn the basics behind the Web’s most popular form of self-expression. And take a step-by-step tour through Blogger, the Google-run blogging service that will have you blogging before you close this book.

This isn’t just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a web site. Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual is a witty and intelligent guide you need to make your ideas and vision a web reality.

Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual

Description

Cascading Style Sheets can turn humdrum websites into highly-functional, professional-looking destinations, but many designers merely treat CSS as window-dressing to spruce up their site’s appearance. You can tap into the real power of this tool with CSS: The Missing Manual. This second edition combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you how to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. Witty and entertaining, this second edition gives you up-to-the-minute pro techniques. You’ll learn how to:

* Create HTML that’s simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS

* Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders

* Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars — complete with rollover effects

* Create effective photo galleries and special effects, including drop shadows

* Get up to speed on CSS 3 properties that work in the latest browser versions

* Build complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs

* Style web pages for printing

With CSS: The Missing Manual, Second Edition, you’ll find all-new online tutorial pages, expanded CSS 3 coverage, and broad support for Firefox, Safari, and other major web browsers, including Internet Explorer 8. Learn how to use CSS effectively to build new websites, or refurbish old sites that are due for an upgrade.

About the Author

David Sawyer McFarland is president of Sawyer McFarland Media, Inc., a Web development and training company in Portland, Oregon. He’s been building websites since 1995, when he designed an online magazine for communication professionals. He’s served as webmaster at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, and oversaw a complete CSS-driven redesign of Macworld.com. David is also a writer, trainer, and teaches in the Portland State University multimedia program. He wrote the bestselling Missing Manual titles on Adobe Dreamweaver, CSS, and JavaScript.

CSS: The Missing Manual

Need to learn HTML fast? This best-selling reference’s visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with HTML in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to HTML, Web expert and best-selling author Elizabeth Castro uses crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today’s HTML and XHTML essentials. You’ll learn how to design, structure, and format your Web site. You’ll create and use images, links, styles, lists, tables, frames, and forms, and you’ll add sound and movies to your site. Finally, you will test and debug your site, and publish it to the Web. Along the way, you’ll find extensive coverage of CSS techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), creating pages for the mobile Web, and more.

It’s important for anyone who creates Web sites–even those who rely on powerful editors like Dreamweaver or GoLive–to know HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium rewrote HTML as a subset of XML (dubbing it “XHTML 1.0″) and the allowable code will eventually be stricter. Tags that are being phased out are labeled “deprecated”–current browsers can still handle them, but if you want your site to keep up with future browsers, not to mention conform to accessibility requirements, you will want to get on top of XHTML.

Of course, Elizabeth Castro manages to write books that not only speak to those who are already fluent in HTML, but are good for newbies too. She makes it a breeze to create sites that are visually stylish and technically sophisticated without the expense of buying an editor.

Among the topics covered in her new book, HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: using the (relatively newer) structural tags (like doctype and div); correctly using older tags (like p and img) that have been modified in XHTML; writing XHTML so that formatting is done by the style sheets; writing those style sheets (cascading style sheets, a.k.a. “CSS”); creating a variety of layouts; and dealing with tables, frames, forms, multimedia, a bit of JavaScript (including mouseovers), WML (for mobile device displays), debugging, publishing, and publicizing your site.

As with all Visual QuickStart Guides, this one features clear and concise instructions side by side with well-captioned illustrations and screen shots that show both the source code and the resulting effect on the Web page. The index is extremely detailed, making this a great reference.

Also great for reference are the outstanding appendices. The first is an extensive list of tags and attributes, indicating which are deprecated and/or proprietary and on which page they are discussed. A similar appendix shows CSS properties and values; given the future of Web coding, this chart alone is worth the price of the book. Other handy charts cover intrinsic events, symbols and character Unicodes, and an expanded color chart that goes way beyond the virtually archaic Web-safe palette. All of which makes this a definite must-have for every Web designer’s bookshelf.

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