Review by Bryan Newman

I’ve been creating websites with Dreamweaver for years now, and all that experience has taught me one thing - I’m a hack web designer. Recently I have been trying to learn industry CSS standards and had heard that Dreamweaver has made great advances in CSS management in CS4 and CS5. I’m embarrassed to say what version I am using.

When I got a chance to get a reviewer copy of this training set I jumped for two reasons, first I was mulling over spending the money to upgrade to DW CS5 and I second I have always that I was missing out on a lot of DW’s capabilities. It’s now obvious that I should upgrade for the CSS management upgrades alone.

As for the value of the training - I couldn’t be happier. This is not an advanced tips and tricks resource, nor is it an exhaustive boot camp in web page authoring, but it is a fairly thorough training taking you from site planning and design to creation and publishing. I watched the videos from beginning to end and they start pretty basic with an HTML refresher then move to the meatier DW specific training. I can see myself returning to several sections later to brush up.

Personally, the CSS, Media, and Forms training videos were enough to justify the price tag. The training lessons were short and easily digestible. I liked that it broke training into 3-10 minutes so I had some time to do a little more in-depth googling on subjects like text wrapping on absolute positioned CSS objects (which it won’t.) or checking my version of DW.

What this isn - An Adobe Certification Training Aid - so it starts from a very low level introduction and goes through the entire DW web creation processn - A wonderfully designed interfacen - A great overview of using DWnnWhat it isn’tn - A substitute for spending the time working with DW (but it will jump start a novice)n - An expert tips and tricks referencennAll in all, I highly recommend this to anyone trying to learn DW or even web design in general. The CSS placement section has been the most enlightening coverage of the topic I have been able to find. The author’s delivery on the videos is great and the interface is the best, most intuitive I have seen. The only bad thing I can say is that the closed captioning is defaulted on, so at times it covered the bottom of the properties table at the bottom of the screen. So sometimes I had to close it to see things the author was pointing out. But all in all, this is an absolutely wonderful product.