The first paragraph in Rachel Andrew's book "Build your own Standards Compliant Website using Dreamweaver 8 states "Traditionally, visual tools like Dreamweaver have received a lot of bad press. Ardent hand-coders point to various examples of terrible markup produced by such tools as evidence for the claim that Visual Tools Are Bad. However, using a visual tool can really help to reduce development time and, if you're someone who works in a visual way, such tools can inspire far more creativity than can a text file full of markup." And, personally, I'd just like to say "hear hear" Ms Andrew, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I'll go further and suggest that this book should be manditory reading for all those aforementioned ardent hand-coders... the time-saving techniques alone in this book would justify the purchase price.

Okay, just to recap ... Web standards are specifications that direct the use of development languages on the Web and are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and cover languages such as HTML, XHTML and CSS (and quite a few others). There is a lot of debate about standards and some programmers say "Its all too hard" but perhaps a glance at this book and the way to achieve those Standards in Dreamweaver might be the first step to changing their minds on the topic. You might like to read our article XHTML 101 which gives a little insight into the topic as well.

But, back to the book ... It is aimed at both Dreamweaver novices and the more experienced users and the list of contents is extensive ... with topic headings like:

• Site Planning and Setting up for Development
• XHTML and semantics
• Constructing the document
• CSS and Dreamweaver
• Constructing the layout with CSS
• Forms and third party services
• Etc.

This book is one of the first published works about Dreamweaver 8 and as such Rachel Andrew has created a must have text for Dreamweaver enthusiasts. Why? Simply because the author offers you an insight into the mind-set of the professional web developer and step-by-step instructions on creating a website in a logical manner plus the bonus of learning loads about the new features in Dreamweaver 8. This was enough to whet my appetite and lead me to devour the book's contents.

The Sitepoint people are offering a free download of the first 100 pages of this 355 page book http://www.sitepoint.com/books/dreamweaver1/ ... a great chance to try before you buy ... even if you're an ardent hand coder.

From a personal point of view i found the book to be a great tutorial from cover to cover, and, even better, shows a logical path to developing a website. The fact that Ms Andrew also states categorically that Standards Compliant websites can also be stylish and attractive and proceeds to show you exactly how to do that utilising CSS is the icing on the cake. The book scores a definite thumbs up from me.