This weeks book review is of a book titled ‘Dreamweaver CS5.5 Mobile and Web Development with HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery’. Now my first comment has to be what a mouthful that is to say, won’t help with any word of mouth advertising but it is informative to what the book covers.
So starting the book I looked upon the contents page and was overwhelmed with the number of topics being covered. At 284 pages my first impression is that the author has tried to cover to much in to little, this worries me from the start as when I purchase a book I expect a minimum level of depth of what I am reading. Rather than stop at the contents page though I decided to persevere and read the book for the purpose of this review.
Upon reading the preface the book starts to irritate me, for one, many working in the web development industry will disagree with the comment ‘Dreamweaver is the most powerful and industry-leading web design software’. A large number of web developers do have Dreamweaver installed but this is usually because it ships with the creative suite which most developers have for photoshop, illustrator and fireworks. Agencies like the one I work for buy creative suite as a package rather than just buying the applications people need, this is usually because it is the cheaper option. I personally only use Dreamweaver for quick amends and email builds, large web builds are done using expresso. Anyway that’s a argument for another day, I just feel people reading the book want to read about using the technologies in Dreamweaver and are going to already know what it is so we don’t need to be informed of this.
So as I continue to read the book I start to realise its not really for professional web developers, it spends to much time covering the GUI rather than the power of the Dreamweaver code editor. I think had I been a web designer I may have been able to learn a lot from the book but as a professional web developer I found it very lacking. Had the writer concentrated more on using the code editor I could have been writing a more favourable review.
The books main saviour is its coverage of creating mobile applications from within Dreamweaver, unfortunately this section is only 10 pages long which is far to little for such an amazing feature of Dreamweaver CS5.5. O’Reilley have an entire book on this subject called Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which does a much better job at getting you started with writing your own mobile applications using HTML5.
Overall I am disappointed by this book, it fails to live up to my expectations, I was expecting to learn about how I can use all these cool technologies with Dreamweaver from the coding perspective. I wasn’t looking to learn about how to create pages using a GUI so if your looking to get your feet wet with HTML5 you are advised to look elsewhere.
So onto the scores,
Value for money – 1/10 – For a web developer this isnt going to be good value for money, there are many more books on the market which will be more suitable
Ease of understanding – 7/10 – While I didn’t enjoy the book it is certainly still easy to understand
Level of prior knowledge required – none. – no knowledge is really required as it guides you through using the GUI to create pages, this book is certainly better for web designers rather than web developers.
If you want to check out the book look at it over on the publishers site Packt Publishing
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