Review Adobe GoLive Bible

Adobe GoLive Bible!
By Deborah Shadovitz
Hungry Minds
www.hungryminds.com
$39.99 list
ISBN: 0-7645-3347-9

Author:

Date: 4/5/02

I'll make it easy for you. If you use GoLive 5 for web design, go buy a copy of Debbie's book. Whatever you pay for it, you'll get it back many fold.

If there's one thing I do recommend Adobe should do: bundle Debbie's book to complement your manuals! Combined they will make a very nice package.

Now that we've gotten our endorsement out up front, let's talk about "the Bible".

Contrary to what Abobe would have you believe, GoLive 5 is a full featured, industrial strength program with a significant learning curve. It competes neck-in-neck with Dreamweaver and the other "Wintel" heavyweights. GoLive and Dreamweaver continually battle it out, playing leap frog with each new version, a sort of "can you do this better?" For us users, it's great! I don't think either party would have introduced so many new features so quickly without this competition.

Now, for the hard part: learning GoLive 5. Here's where Debbie comes to the rescue. The GL5 Bible is very easy to read and follow. There are many optional courses of action suggested. Adobe's own manuals are relatively dry and are written in typical manual "speak". The GL5 Bible also brings in commentary involving third party material. What you get is much more practical and usable as compared to Adobe's manuals. To be fair, however, because of all the third party plug-ins etc., Adobe has to stick to the straight and narrow.

The GL5 Bible includes a bonus CD that includes a lot of extras. First, the exercises discussed within GL5 Bible have real-life versions of the templates shown in the book. Second there's some very nice "freebie" software, java actions, graphics and GoLive tools that will make your web life go much easier.

Includes are ZipIt 1.4 that zips and unzips Mac archives in a format fully compatible with PKZip for Windows. Snapz Pro 2,0,1 is a neat screen capture solution for the Mac. Dragon Web Surveys 5.0v4 is a fabulous way to create surveys for use on the web. Poll-it 1.2 is a quick way to do polls on the net. There's a Spell Catcher demo, along with DropStuff and DropZip. Gamma Toggle lets you see what your page looks like with a PC's gamma setting (which is darker than a Mac's). Pop Char Pro 1.2 makes KeyCaps obsolete. GL5 CatologBuilder is an intuitive e-commerce front end for GoLive 5 and the Catalog-Builder shopping cart. It gives you a nice, robust e-commerce solution that is user friendly and based on successful sales and marketing methods developed in the mail order catalog field.

Document Express Pro is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for e-mail response that doesn't require a web-hosted database. It's designed for e-mail marketing, collecting customers and can be customized for creative marketing. This alone is worth the price of buying the GL5 Bible.

The exercises on the CD complement the book and give you hands-on practice with web-site creation. Also, there are quite a few GL5 tools you can use in your site creation. The graphics included are quite a few photos from different photographers, the Web Spice Clip Art Collection from DeMorgan Industries and the famous "Invisible GIF" used in web site design. You also get an office version of Visibone's Online Color Scheme Lab that will save you hours of work selecting the right colors for your site. Other goodies include Firstuse.com, a worldwide internet-based registry that provides digital fingerprinting of your design and intellectual property to deter copyright theft and Client Questionnaire, a set of questions to present to your clients to help guide communications and production and promote ethical standards.

As you can see, you get a lot with the GoLive Bible. It's certainly worthwhile reading, in addition to all the extras you receive.

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