A book the size of this Official Guide to Using Dreamweaver MX 2004 must be complete. In 1238 pages, Gutman covers everything that you can possibly do with Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Although the book is called "Dreamweaver Demystified", the author could have just as easily called it "HTML demystified" or "Flash demystified". The first chapters of this encyclopedic work cover Dreamweaver MX 2004 and coding HTML. The book cover says the book is aimed at intermediate level readers, but beginners in HTML will learn how to code properly in Dreamweaver with this book as well. A few chapters are dedicated to CSS and CSS-P. They're the weakest chapters of the book, but that doesn't mean they lack completeness. Far from it. It is just that CSS still isn't as widely used as tables for positioning elements on a page. Tables, on the other hand, are covered extensively. So is DHTML, by the way, which isn't very popular either. But DHTML allows you to make a web site more dynamic in its looks and is well supported by Dreamweaver MX 2004. After those chapters, Gutman is about halfway the book. She then goes on to tackle dynamic sites, Flash, integration with Contribute and Fireworks, and of course ColdFusion. If you would think she limits herself strictly to Dreamweaver, you'd better take a closer look: PHP, ASP, WebDAV, it's all explained thoroughly and pretty much in-depth---certainly for a book that claims only to demystify Dreamweaver. Finally, a few chapters on extensions and customizing Dreamweaver itself are the icing on the cake. Throughout reading the book I couldn't help myself comparing it to Inside Dreamweaver MX 2004. When I read that book, I honestly thought there couldn't be a book that matches the broad coverage and its depth of feature discussion. Well, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Demystified not only matches the Inside series, it surpasses it. That's because it goes far beyond the application itself.