Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

About the Outline

Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual is divided into six parts, each containing several chapters:

• Part One: Building a Web Page explores Dreamweaver’s interface and takes you through the basic steps of page-building. It explains how to add and format text, how to link from one page to another, how to spice up your designs with graphics, and introduces you to Cascading Style Sheets.

• Part Two: Building a Better Web Page takes you deeper into Dreamweaver and provides in-depth CSS coverage. In addition, you’ll get step-by-step instructions for creating advanced page layouts, as well as advice on how to view and work with the underlying HTML code of a page.

  Warning

  Previous versions of this book contained a chapter on HTML frames—a method of displaying several web pages in a single browser window. This technique is going the way of the dodo bird. Since Dreamweaver CS5 is full of so many useful and exciting features and this book’s already bursting at its seams (any more pages, and this book would have to come with a medical warning to those with bad backs), the frames chapter has been moved online. You can find it, free of charge, at www.sawmac.com/missing/dw8/appc.pdf.

• Part Three: Bringing Your Pages to Life helps you add interactivity to your site. From using forms to collect information from site visitors to adding interactive page widgets like tabbed interfaces with the Spry framework, this section guides you through adding animation, multimedia, and other interactive effects with ease.

• Part Four: Building a Website covers the big picture: managing the pages and files on your website, testing links and pages, and moving your site onto a web server connected to the Internet. And since you’re not always working solo, this section covers features that let you work with a team of web developers.

• Part Five: Dreamweaver CS5 Power shows you how to take full advantage of such timesaving features as Libraries, Templates, and History panel automation. It also covers Dreamweaver’s Extension Manager, a program that can add hundreds of new free and commercial features to the program.

• Part Six: Dynamic Dreamweaver presents a gentle introduction to the often confusing and complex world of database-driven websites. You’ll learn what you need to know to build a dynamic site; how to connect Dreamweaver to a database; and how to use Dreamweaver to build pages that can display database information as well as how you add, edit, and delete database records. The last chapter of this section covers the powerful XSLT tools for converting XML files (including RSS feeds) into browser-ready web designs.