Inside UltraDev 4

This book is a great companion to New Riders' other Dreamweaver text, Inside Dreamweaver 4. (Buy that one, too!) While it devotes a chapter to basic page design in case the reader doesn't own a book on design, it doesn't retread the contents of the other volume. Nor does it attempt to be everything to everyone.Instead, this text focuses on what sets Dreamweaver Ultradev apart from the basic version of Dreamweaver (and from other web page design tools): its ability to create data-driven web pages. Author Nicholson takes the reader through the base foundation one needs to undertake the building of a "live" web site, and then guides us step by step through a practical tutorial that builds upon each acquired skill.The tips in this book are worth the price alone. I find myself making big read asterisks in the margin next to most of them. Like its companion volume, and other New Riders books, this book does not take a "cookie cutter" approach. Mr. Nicholson is not afraid to say that a certain feature doesn't always work well and may require a workaround (which he gives you). Both books present Dreamweaver in the context of best practices in web page design and application development, so you not only learn the tool you're reading about; you learn solid principles of good design. Yes, the book has some minor mistakes, for which the author has courteously provided errata on the companion website.... Frankly, I know of NO computer book that doesn't have some mistakes, and the problems I encountered in Chapter 8 of this book only made my troubleshooting skills stronger. Of course, if you don't have the time to create the files from scratch (or simply don't want to), you can download the files from the web site. But you're short-changing yourself if you don't try creating the pages yourself, because you will learn some good design tips and Dreamweaver shortcuts. Don't be mislead to think that you won't need to touch any code if you use Dreamweaver Ultradev, or even the regular version of Dreamweaver. The product is not designed to shield you from coding completely. A little (or a lot of) scripting knowledge can never hurt.I can't say enough good things about this book. I have seen other, more voluminous texts that aren't nearly as useful or direct in their approach.

I'm not kidding this book is best one I've ever found on the web site.If you are planning to build a database-driven website from the ground using UD4 then I'll say you just found the right book. As matter of fact, this is my first time to build a dynamic web site and have no idea how to get start. Especially, when I, first time, used UD4 I was confused by the UD4's tutorial such as define a site, local Info, Remote Info etc I have no idea what they are and how they work.This book troubleshoots all my problems after I finished the chapter exercises. The beginner should start from the first chapter, trust me you will learn alot step-by-step. You can also jump to any chapter you want, the author has the guide for the skipers i.e. the exercise files, by charter but each chapter's files will cover previous chapter's so you'll never get lost. Best of all, Sean Nicholson, althor, help me out for the web server database, SQL Server 2000 on the web, connection via IP address problem from email. Note I had been struggled for the connection for weeks, and I spent days by searching the solution from forums.macromedia.com and other places with no success. Finally I gave it a try see if the author can help me out or not so I sent email, [email protected], to him(I don't expect he would answer me). Thank God, he just did. So appreciate for Sean's support.Jee Fong IRI Consultants to Management 440 E. Congress, Suite 400 Detroit, MI 48226 USA (Pho) 313-965-0350 Ext: 366 (Fax) 313-965-7545 [email protected] www.irisolutions.com

I was in a time crunch to finish a school project and I wanted to use UltraDev to make my site dynamic. This book was exactly what I was looking for. The lessons are clear and well written. The only thing that I must warn you all about is that there is a chapter with some errors. On the book's web site (...) there is the errata for that chapter where the errors are explained and corrected. I just didn't know about it for 2 weeks and I went crazy trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Finally I wrote to the author and he wrote me back within 2 minutes informing me of the errata. The author even took the time to write me a detailed email when I asked him a few questions about UltraDev (not pretaining to the book). Because of this book, I now have an advanced site with e-commerce capabilities. I would definately recommend the book to anyone interested in learning UltraDev.

I'm in the middle of creating an .ASP site, using Dreamweaver UltraDev, but not to its full extent. I'm LOST! But once I started reading Sean's book, I began to understand. I knew what I wanted to do, this book showed me how to do it.When needing a quick refreshing of my memory, it was easy to find my topics, the screen shots were very accurate and I didn't have to re-read much before my memory was refreshed.I'm constantly updating my site, and Inside Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 doesn't leave my desk. This is a great book for beginners to learn what they need and for others as a great reference.Great job Sean!

I am a Dreamweaver user who was asked to explore the potential of UltraDev in its ability to connect our existing web site to a database. Although I am very familiar with Dreamweaver and HTML, I had no clue when it came to databases or ASP. Enter Inside Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.I took me about a week to get through the entire book and walk through all the tutorials. By the time I was done, I had a site that was connected to a database and allowed me to add, edit, and update records. In addition, I learned the basics of password protecting sites and adding dynamic images and text to my pages. Now I can take what I learned and expand our existing, boring pages to include dynamic content. Just an FYI...until about a week ago, I didn't even know what dynamic content was About the only downside to the book is that it shows you **how** the program works and how to build a dynamic site using UltraDev, but it doesn't focus on breaking down the code (in my case VBScript). This is probably beyond the intent of the book so I'm not counting off .I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to learn how to build dynamic web sites.