I answer a lot of questions in the Dreamweaver forums, and realized that a lot of the solutions I was coming up with for people weren’t easy to find after a couple of days. So, rather than letting them disappear into cyberoblivion, I decided to add any of general interest to the cookbook when I had a few spare moments. The Dreamweaver Cookbook is intended for code samples, and doesn’t have the capability of including screenshots, so I’ll continue posting longer tutorials on my own site. But I hope you’ll find my contributions to the cookbook useful.

Here are direct links to some of the articles I have added to the Dreamweaver Cookbook:

• Create nested lists from a recordset
• Set a time limit on a login session
• Registration system that requires the user to validate the email address (in two parts)
• Alternate colours for table rows (using PHP, Spry, or jQuery)
• Upload image to website
• Format date for insertion into MySQL
• Formatting dates stored in MySQL

The Dreamweaver Cookbook is open to anyone to either request recipes or contribute recipes of their own. It could turn into a very useful resource if people start using it regularly. Check it out!

This second problem is finally becoming less acute, thanks to the release of Internet Explorer 8 in March this year. IE8 supports the whole of CSS2.1, and its accurate rendering of CSS puts it on a level with other standards-compliant browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Getting StartED with CSS was written after the release of IE8, so it’s bang up to date; and it concentrates on CSS as rendered by modern browsers, rather than getting bogged down in details of hacks to persuade older browsers to behave. However, since the bane of web designers’ lives, IE6, is likely to be around for some time to come, the book does offer advice on how to deal with the most common bugs in IE6.

Where I hope my book stands out from others is in the way it avoids throwing a whole load of theory at your before you can achieve anything practical with CSS. Instead of forcing you to wade through a detailed explanation of classes and other selectors before you start using CSS, I show you how to achieve practical results with the most basic selector of all, the type (or tag) selector, which redefines the default look of HTML tags. I don’t get into classes until Chapter 4 (of 12).

Another difference is the way I approach the box model, an understanding of which is essential to working with CSS. Instead of bamboozling you with a whole pile of theory, I devote a whole chapter to showing how margins are used to create space between elements and lay them out. The following chapter builds on this by discussing how to add backgrounds and borders. Finally, a third chapter brings the whole box model together by adding padding, width, and height into the mix. My aim is that by introducing each aspect of the box model gradually, you build up a better understanding of how it all fits together. By the of the twelfth chapter, you have studied all visual and print properties in CSS2.1, including some of the less well-known ones, such as generated content.

Perhaps my only disappointment with the book is that it’s printed in black and white. However, the plus side is that the publisher has given it a relatively inexpensive price tag, at least for a computer book. The cover price is $24.99, and many online sellers are offering it for a discount. Sadly, the price is more expensive outside the USA, but that always seems to be the case with books.

The book’s companion website contains a complete reference to all CSS2.1 visual and print properties, and selectors, together with lots of examples of the properties in action. I hope you’ll find the site useful even if you don’t buy the book. But, of course, I hope you will decide to buy.

That’s a shame, because Bridge has some very useful features. I use it frequently for batch renumbering my photos and for selecting photos to use in websites. The thumbnail images can be resized, making light work of choosing the best photo to zap into Photoshop and optimize for a web page. The other great feature in Bridge is what is called the Adobe Output Module. Among other things, this creates Flash-based web galleries of your visual assets. It’s incredibly easy to use, and produces really nice results.

The only problem is that the HTML file generated by Bridge makes the Flash movie fill the entire browser window, making it impossible to incorporate the gallery into an existing website. Well, it’s not really impossible. All it needs is a little editing of the HTML and JavaScript. I have created a new tutorial with step-by-step instructions to show how to incorporate an Adobe Bridge web gallery into a website. I hope you find it useful.

It’s obvious that people love the ability to create a menu bar in seconds, but they hate banging their head on their keyboard trying to figure out how to edit the CSS. In response, I’ve created a couple of tutorials that are now live on my site. The first one goes into considerable detail, explaining the basics of customizing the CSS of a Spry Menu Bar, with instructions for both horizontal and vertical menu bars. The other, shorter tutorial shows how to centre a horizontal menu bar. I hope you find them useful.

My motive for writing the book was the release of Internet Explorer 8, which offers full support for the whole of CSS2.1. Of course, it will take some time before older, buggy versions of Internet Explorer finally disappear. Even so, the rapid uptake of IE8 means that more than half of all people surfing the web now use a standards-compliant browser. IE8’s support for CSS2.1 is as good as Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. In some respects, it’s even better. If cross-browser support for CSS has been holding you back, it shouldn’t do so any longer.

The other thing I had in mind is that most books I have read on CSS either throw a lot of rules at you all at once, or they just concentrate on “cool” techniques. My aim was to avoid front-loading the book with a mass of rules. After outlining a few basics, I introduce new rules and concepts only as they’re needed. However, you can’t avoid rules in CSS; and by the time you reach the end of Getting StartED with CSS, you will have studied every visual and print property in the CSS2.1 specification. The book teaches you some cool techniques, but the main emphasis is on understanding how CSS works by explaining how everything fits together and showing you how to use CSS analysis tools, such as Firebug, the Web Inspector panel in Safari 4, and the Developer Tools panel in IE8.

Like most of my other books, it’s a mixture of reference material and hands-on exercises. There’s also a very comprehensive appendix that lists all properties with their permitted values, and references back to the chapters where you can find a full description of how to use them.

The only recent ones not yet available on Kindle are The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 and The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4. Both are long and contain a large number of screenshots, so it might take some time to convert them. Once they are, though, I’m sure Kindle owners will be delighted at no longer needing to lug such heavy books around.

I only wish that Amazon would make Kindle available in Europe (and other parts of the world), too. I’ve been itching to get my hands on a Kindle.

O’Reilly classifies a programming language as “large” if more than 100,000 copies of books dedicated to that language sell during the year. That’s the total for all titles, not how many copies of each book that sell. According to O’Reilly’s data (gathered from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks roughly 70% of book sales in the USA), books on PHP were the third most popular category, selling a total of more than 173,000 units. The bad news is that 129 titles were competing for the same PHP book market, making the average sales for each title a meagre 1,340. I haven’t seen my sales figures for Q4 2008, but I’m pleased to say that the figures for the first three quarters put my sales well above the average. However, they’re not all that big, which is why I was surprised to find my book at number 3. O’Reilly lists the top 5 as follows:

1. Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform
2. Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One
3. The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP
4. Head First Design Patterns
5. PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide

It’s interesting to note that three of the top 5 are about PHP, confirming my belief that PHP is a strong language that’s here to stay for a long while.

With so many books competing for a relatively small market, you might wonder why authors like me continue to write. Researching, writing, and editing a book takes many months of hard work—and all for the sake of a couple of dollars royalty on each copy sold. Part of the answer lies in the fact that I like writing. I did it for many years in my career as a radio and TV journalist; it’s what I’m good at. It’s also nice to see my work in print. In TV and radio news, I might have been seen or heard by millions, but once the news bulletin was over, that was it. Although computer books have a relatively short shelf life, they certainly last longer than a news bulletin; and I hope my readers get practical value from them.

The other thing that drives many of us to write is the hope that, one day, we’ll hit the big time. O’Reilly has also analyzed the top three best-selling writers of computer books: David Pogue, Scott Kelby, and Andy Rathbone. Between them, they account for nearly 6 percent of the computer book market. Andy Rathbone, who comes in at number 3, sells more books each year than I have sold since I started writing about PHP and web design five years ago. David Pogue, the biggest seller, clocked up an impressive 190,000 copies last year. I’m sure he’s delighted—and let’s be honest, he deserves success because he’s a good writer—but it pales into insignificance alongside JK Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who bought my book and helped me reach number 3 in the Large Programming Languages category. And thank you to O’Reilly for doing all the number crunching.

If you’re contemplating buying one of my books, and want a better idea of what they’re like, sample chapters in PDF format are available for each title. Just go to the list of web design books at friends of ED, and click the link for the title you’re interested in. This brings up a description of the book; you can download the sample chapter from the links on the right.