Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8

David Powers

Nov 2006 · Apress

About this ebook

Confession time. When I first started developing dynamic websites with Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, I made a complete mess of things. I believed rather naively that Dreamweaver would “do it all” for me, and that all I needed to do was point and click. The first couple of projects actually went well, giving me a false sense of security. As soon as I attempted anything that didn’t fit into the same p- tern as the basic tutorials, things began to go horribly wrong. Even though I’ve always been happy working with code, one look inside Code view sent shivers up my spine. Part of the problem was that I didn’t have a clear grasp of database structure or of what server-side technology really involved. The other part of the problem was that I was treating Dreamweaver as a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program. If I saw something wasn’t in the right place, I just highlighted it in Design view and hit DELETE. What I didn’t realize was that this left behind messy code that caused even the simplest of applications to break. The more I deleted, the worse it got. I don’t want that to happen to you. That’s why I wrote this book.

About the author

David Powers is an Adobe Community Expert for Dreamweaver and author of a series of highly successful books on PHP, including PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. As a professional writer, he has been involved in electronic media for more than 30 years, first with BBC radio and television and more recently with the Internet. His clear writing style is valued not only in the English-speaking world; several of his books have been translated into Spanish and Polish. What started as a mild interest in computing was transformed almost overnight into a passion, when David was posted to Japan in 1987 as BBC correspondent in Tokyo. With no corporate IT department just down the hallway, he was forced to learn how to fix everything himself. When not tinkering with the innards of his computer, he was reporting for BBC television and radio on the rise and collapse of the Japanese bubble economy. Since leaving the BBC to work independently, he has built up an online bilingual database of economic and political analysis for Japanese clients of an international consultancy. When not pounding the keyboard writing books or dreaming of new ways of using PHP and other programming languages, David enjoys nothing better than visiting his favorite sushi restaurant. He has also translated several plays from Japanese.