Adobe has officially announced the forthcoming release of Creative Suite 4, including Dreamweaver CS4, which I consider to be the most significant upgrade to Dreamweaver since 2002. Over the past few months, I have been beavering away rewriting The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP to bring it up to date with all the new features in CS4. Every chapter has been rewritten, and there’s a lot of new material, including coverage of time-saving features, such as Related Files, Live view, and the Code Navigator. The coverage of Ajax has also been strengthened, with a new chapter that helps you get under the hood of Spry, Adobe’s implementation of Ajax, as well as working with other JavaScript frameworks, such as jQuery and the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library. The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP is due to be published on 1 December. More details here…
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The CS3 edition is one of the best books ever written for web developers, in my humble opinion. I’ll definitely purchase the updated edition when it comes out.
I also look forward to your new book. I wondered after looking at your excellent and clear video tutorials if you have any plans for releasing a video based tutorial for Dreamweaver, php and related technologies in the vein of say, Lynda.com or total training?
Now that I have finally got the book out of the way, I would like to do some video tutorials. I’ll post the details here when I finally get round to making any.
Wow, pretty cool to see my Amazon.com review quoted on this book’s home page! I’m really looking forward to reading the CS4 update.
I was missing PHP OOP intellisense features in the DW CS4 videos. Are there any? Because if not so, the new DW features are not really for power-developers
Would be great to get feedback on this!
Regards
magoo
Hi magoo,
Unfortunately, Dreamweaver CS4 doesn’t have code hint support for PHP OOP. It’s something that I have requested for some time, but Adobe decided not to make any major changes to the server-side features of Dreamweaver this time. However, the new features that have been incorporated – Live View, Related Files, Code Navigator, and JavaScript introspection, to name the most important – make this a serious upgrade.
Adobe has dropped hints about concentrating on the server-side next time round. If there are particular features that you would like to see incorporated, this is a good time to submit a formal feature request to Adobe.
Hello David,
You have said elsewhere that Dreamweaver requires some knowledge of CSS and HTML. How would you suggest a novice acquire this knowledge or background so that he/she can begin to utilize DW CS4 asap. Thanks in advance.
Richard Shalhoub
Boston, MA
Hi Richard,
It’s a long time since I learned HTML and CSS, so I tend not to read books aimed at beginners any more. The important thing is to understand the basics of HTML and CSS, so that you can feel comfortable looking at the code created by Dreamweaver. With HTML, you certainly don’t need to learn every tag and attribute by heart; but you do need to understand what the code for headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables looks like. Learning CSS is a longer term process. There are approximately 80 or 90 CSS properties, most of which are intuitively named. The difficulty of CSS lies in learning how to combine those properties to produce the effect you desire. That comes only with practice and studying the CSS on websites that you admire.
For online resources, you can start with the tutorials at W3Schools. If you prefer a book, one that is widely recommended is “HTML, XHTML, and CSS” by Elizabeth Castro. I believe that takes a traditional teaching approach. If you don’t mind the quirky approach taken by Head First books, I was one of the main technical advisers on “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML” by Eric and Elizabeth Freeman. In spite of its quirky approach, the Head First book is rock solid.
Hello,
I bought the CS 4 book and before I bought the CS 3 book.
It is a shame that you took all the php stuff out and replaced it with mamp.
I understand this is a shortcut for you but to readers it means more digging on the net if you want to do it by hand, the way you have to do it at future jobs and so on.
Don’t get me wrong you have the skills to learn us, but it would be nice to say so in the discription that php is not coverd in the old way but now run by mamp.
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for buying both books. I can understand your disappointment at my decision to drop the PHP installation details from the new version, but as I explained in the book, a lot of new versions were due out around the time of publication. I’m already regretting the decision to include installation details for phpMyAdmin, because the release of version 3.1.0 on the same day as the book’s publication means that section is already out of date. Trying to keep track of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin in Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 was just taking up too much time and effort. Instead, I decided to concentrate on using Dreamweaver effectively with PHP and Ajax.
Quite frankly, I have found it impossible to keep up with the deluge of questions about installation. Some people have genuine problems, but a large number of questions come from people who have failed to follow my instructions correctly. As a result, I have cut back on the level of support I offer in the friends of ED forum. It’s a pity, but the careless readers have spoiled it for others.
Hello David,
Thanks for your honest answer.
To tell you the truth I have never been at the forum, I rather check the errata page.
If it doesn’t work than I must be doing something wrong.
I learned this by doing it again and again and than suddenly it works.
It is a shame that people take abuse that a writer spends time to help and than they ask for every little trouble they run in to.
I will keep on buying your books and I hope you don’t stop because of all this.
php solutions is mine to now, even do I have to say it looks daunting.
(for a front-end developer, but you have to start some where)
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and support for the mac.
Dennis from Amsterdam, Holland.
QUESTION FOR THE AUTHOR …
Background:
I took a semester-long PHP programming class in fall 2008. I am the webmaster for an organization with over 600 members, 15 events per year, and I create lots of pages that I am constantly having to update. But I do it all in notepad with basic HTML and server-side includes. I recently purchased the Adobe Creative Suite with Dreamweaver CS4. I am trying to make my life easier by learning Dreamweaver. I am also in the middle of trying to learn MYSQL better so that I can set up an online registration form system that I will program with PHP. I am also using PHP for the Paypal instant payment notification (IPN).
Question:
I am looking for a good PHP with MYSQL book. I saw pages from your Dreamweaver 8 with PHP book in “google books,” and it looks fantastic! I especially like the sections on PHP and MYSQL. I looked you up on Amazon and found out that your CS4 with PHP Ajax etc book just came out. However, I’m wondering if it has as good of a section for beginners with MYSQL? I just loved the way the Foundation Dreamweaver 8 with PHP book was written (based on the pages I saw at Google Books). Do you think the new CS4 book still has everything I need? Is the new CS4 book really for beginners the way the Dreamweaver 8 with PHP bok is? Or would it be okay to use the Dreamweaver 8 book and just adapt it for CS4, since CS4 is what I’ve got? I have another textbook on Dreamweaver CS3 that I’m using as part of my Dreamweaver class (that’s CS3 because the teacher asked us to get that particular book).
Would you please e-mail back with your answer? Thanks for your help!
Rachel,
Sorry to take so long to reply. The Dreamweaver CS4 book contains not only similar beginner material for working with PHP/MySQL; it’s more up to date than the Dreamweaver 8 book. If you’re using DW CS4, definitely get the CS4 book.
Hi, I added your site in my rss reader. Thanks
Hello David,
I have been trying to get my head around using Dreamweaver CS4 with a Drupal site that I am building (& learning) but am finding it a challenge bringing the two together. My immediate goal is to leverage the features of Dreamweaver to help me to create an accessible Drupal theme for my site, but intend on continuing to use this (and the other tools in the CS4 suite) for maintenance and continual development as I continue to learn PHP, SQL, and the other dynamic aspects.
The problem is that the various files used for theming Drupal (.inc, php, tpl.php, css, etc.) seem to be scattered making it difficult to get a unified view of it all working together. The new features of CS4 (related documents, etc.) give me hope however.
Also giving me hope was noticing in an illustration of your book (which, btw, I’m finding to be extremely well written and helpful!) where, quite incidently, you appear to be testing a Drupal database!!
Could you please point me to any resources, tools, or ‘gotchas’ that you might have discovered in your experiments with the two applications? I haven’t been able to find much of anything in this space other then a fairly popular blog (& responses) that seemed to pit one against the other.
Thanks
Bill
To be honest, Bill, I find Drupal a great beast that’s difficult to tame. The first time I experimented with it, I found myself going round and round in circles with the online documentation. I found some good online tutorials, and bookmarked the site, but see that it no longer exists. My second experiment with Drupal more recently got me much further. What helped me was the book, Using Drupal. However, I never actually got as far as developing a site of my own with it.
Although I defined a site in Dreamweaver for my experiment, I didn’t find Dreamweaver to be of any particular help. Dreamweaver’s PHP functionality at the moment is geared much more to using Dreamweaver server behaviors. It has remained basically unchanged since 2002, when Drupal was in its infancy. Adobe has hinted that it will make changes to support for server-side languages in the next version of Dreamweaver. Whether that will actually happen, and whether it will make it easier to work with Drupal is anybody’s guess.
Hi David,
I’m very impressed with your book, the standard and detail of your explanations is excellent. I especially appreciate that you don’t start to take shortcuts as you get further into the book, as so many others do in my experience. Thank you for so much help learning DW CS4.
I may have found a small problemette, which I wonder if you could clarify for me though…
Chapter 16, page 726, step 11: updating the author. Would you really need to check to see if the author already exists in the database? You are updating him/her! I’ve found that when I try to submit the form, I’m told that the author is already registered (Duh!). I have removed the checks and now it works fine. Is this the right solution?
Thanks again,
Mermaid