by Jed Clampett

June 1, 2001

If you are a serious Dreamweaver user you have probably spent some time in the Macromedia Dreamweaver forum where I'm sure you've seen Al Sparbers' frequent contributions. Not only does he know his stuff but he's a nice guy too! Al's Web site is Project VII (www.projectseven.com) where he has tutorials as well as great Web site templates for sale. Well enough about who the author is and on to this great book. Oops, I just gave away my closing statement.

This is not a book for someone wanting to learn Dreamweaver it's for serious designers and developers who want to push the limits with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver 4 magic has all kind of "unique" techniques for navigation and more that you won't see anywhere else. Some of the navigation types in the book are drop-downs, fly-outs, treeviews and pop-ups. There is a slide and scroll layers tutorial (the first one I did), custom CSS extension and plenty of other extensions that were developed just for this book. These are no ordinary designs either, you'd be proud to put your name on any of them.

To be honest I was a tad concerned about being able to follow the instructions. I'm certainly not new to Dreamweaver but I haven't used a lot of the advanced features. I tried a tutorial from the Project VII Web site which left me frustrated. Well I'm pleased to say that this book is even more advanced then the one I tried and much easier to understand. The Magic series format makes the step-by-step instructions easy to follow, logical and most importantly accurate. There were a couple of mistakes in the book but true to Al's efficiency the fixes are already posted to the supporting Web site. And if a supporting Web site isn't enough, how about a special forum where you can ask questions and get some pretty darn quick answers not only from Al but from a whole community of great Dreamweaver users.

Although most of the book is done by Al Sparber there are other contributors as well such as Craig Foster, Gerry Jacobsen, Linda Rathegeber and Murray Summers. If two heads are better than one then what must 5 heads be? You guessed it, a book you don't want to miss!

Copyright 2001, Jed Clampett, All Rights Reserved