Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 shipped in October 2008, with deeper support for developing advanced websites.
Dreamweaver CS4 is easier to use, having adopted the Adobe interface design, especially for customizing your workspace.
For editing individual pages, the new Live View mode lets you design pages in the fully-rendered browser view, and simultaneously view and update the underlying raw HTML. You also can directly access related files including linked CSS styles, with assists for creating styles with CSS best practices.
For creating more dynamic sites, Dreamweaver can incorporate popular Ajax and JavaScript frameworks, for example displaying interactive data by using Spry Data Sets to load content from simple HTML tables.
If you're familiar with Web design, and interested in learning Dreamweaver CS4, check out Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques.
The author, David Karlins, is a Web designer, teacher, and digital graphics consultant, and the author of more than 20 books on digital graphic and interactive design
This book is not for novices; it does not spend time on basic Web design (HTML and CSS), or on explaining the general Adobe user interface. Instead the first chapter skips basic page design to dive right in to the logistics of managing an entire website of files, and updating them to a remote site.
The first half of the book then steps through important techniques in building pages, including tables, divs, text, images, style sheets, and templates and libraries shared across the site. Each of these 100 techniques explains the idea, steps through the operation (with screen shots), and includes additional tips.
The second half of the book covers interactive content, including pages built with live data, Spry validation for user input, Spry effects, JavaScript behaviors, and embedded video clips. The last chapter then covers testing and maintaining sites, especially for browser compatibility.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos is targeted to an intermediate audience, with enough Web experience to understand how to apply these various techniques in a larger project, and enough experience with earlier versions of Dreamweaver or similar products to be able to dive in to the instructions. For example, chapter 5 dives into Dreamweaver's Absolute Placement Objects / divs, and then only later discusses CSS divs -- there's no general introductory context explaining these, or why it's useful to use divs for page layout.
The 100 Essential Techniques are exactly that, clear explanations of how to perform important page and site design functions with Dreamweaver, from basic formatting to more advanced interactivity.
See full article: Summary: Adobe Creative Suite 4 for a summary of the CS4 suites and individual applications.
Find Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos on Amazon.com
Find the Adobe CS4 Web Suite Suite on Amazon.com
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques
by David Karlins
Adobe Press / Peachpit; November, 2008
Paperback, 264 pages, ISBN-10: 0321562895
List: $24.99, Street $16
Contents
Chapter One: Creating a Website
Chapter Two: Creating Web Pages
Chapter Three: Creating and Formatting Tables
Chapter Four: Using Framesets
Chapter Five: Designing Pages with Absolute Placement Objects
Chapter Six: Formatting Text
Chapter Seven: Working with Images
Chapter Eight: Creating and Using Custom Templates and Libraries
Chapter Nine: Working with External Style Sheets
Chapter Ten: Collecting Data in Forms
Chapter Eleven: Defining Spry Validation Widgets
Chapter Twelve: Embedding Media
Chapter Thirteen: Adding Effects and Interactivity with Spry
Chapter Fourteen: Using Spry Data Sets
Chapter Fifteen: Adding Interactivity with Behaviors
Chapter Sixteen: Testing and Maintaining Sites