Since the book has received some five-star reviews, it is obviously serving the needs of some readers. I would like to mention several things that may limit its value to others.

First, the book is clearly more of an extended tutorial than a reference work. You have to want to take the time to work through each exercise (24 one-hour exercises in all), working on the author's whimsical little website called MyKipple.com. Beginners will probably find this a good way to learn, at least for the easier exercises earlier in the book. Users with previous web design experience might prefer to have the workings of the program more simply stated, without having to learn them by working on the same couple of pages over and over again. All users will have to be able to abstract the design principles from the details of the "do this, now do this, now do this...." It isn't always easy to distinguish the general procedures to follow in constructing your own site from the instructions that apply only to the practice site. I would have liked a better explanation of the material first, and then the practice exercise applying it to MyKipple.com for those who want it.

When the book gets to some of the more powerful design tools, such as prepackaged layouts and cascading style sheets, the fact that the tutorial has already led you to create pages with specific content creates a little confusion. The early exercises tell you to do something in a primitive way, and then the later exercises tell you to revise it in order to take advantage of the tool that in real life you should have used in the first place! For example, when you design your own site, you probably want to select a layout with places for a heading, navigation menu, etc., and then create the content to fill it. But when this book comes to layouts, it has you take the page you've already created and rework its content and styling to fit it into the new layout. In your own web design, you will probably want to proceed in almost the opposite order of these tutorials, working with the general organizational tools before you add the specific content. I realize that any book has to cover things in steps, but I would have appreciated a general putting-it-all-together chapter that forgets the practice site and suggests a logical way to proceed when you are trying to organize your own site. This book seems to get bogged down in the details of MyKipple.com and lose sight of the bigger picture from the reader's perspective.

The practice exercises sometimes lead the author to cover one thing in the context of another thing, instead of making it a topic in its own right. The important topic of how to create a simple navigation menu is buried on pp. 238-9 in the context of how to adapt existing content to a new layout. Not only does it make the discussion unnecessarily confusing, but it makes it hard to find the section again, since the index doesn't reference it under the heading of either "menu" or "navigation" (the latter term isn't an index heading at all). The menu heading in the index refers you primarily to the chapter on how to create advanced drop-down menus using layers or CSS.

Finally, I noticed a lot of minor errors in the book that reflect poor editing, especially in chapter 1, where the numbers and titles of figures don't correspond very well with the text. Some material seems to be missing at the end of p. 99. The book is printed in fairly small type; some of the figures are very hard to read; and the index is not very thorough. For example, there's no listing for "float," a vital technique for creating multi-column layouts.

After becoming frustrated with this book, I bought David McFarland's CSS: The Missing Manual. That book isn't specific to Expression Web alone, but it provides a much, much clearer introduction to programming with cascading style sheets, a large part of what Expression Web is all about. It is beautifully written, with a great balance between general principles and exercises. Unless you are already very good at CSS, that book is the much better place to start.

In general, I think all readers can learn something from Sam's Teach Yourself MEW2, and readers with the patience of Job will learn a lot, but I think the book makes it harder than it has to be.

Not a particularly bad book. It does give the beginner (like me) a fairly good intro to Expression Web 2.

However, it could have been a better book. The weakness?? It's that the author lacks the ability to teach well. Over and over again, he fails to make his point in a manner that is simple, detailed, unambiguous, and coherent.

Also, he makes the mistake of believing that what is obvious to him (and therefore not in need of explanation) will likewise be obvious to the reader, and this is one of the most fundamental mistakes a teacher can make (I know this! I am a teacher!!)

Most of the lesson material is of the "Do this...Then do this...Then do this" variety and never follows up with what we are supposed to be accomplishing, why it is done the way it is, and where else the particular point can be applied.

Overall, its worth going through once. Doing so will give the beginner a general idea of what Expression Web 2 has to offer. But it cannot be considered a reference book that one will return to later. It simply lacks the required substance for that.

Bri

I tried all of previous Web Expression 2 books. This is the best...dont even waste your time with the others. This is the only one that takes you from start to finish on a brand spanking new website. If you have no idea about websites or code, then this book will do the trick.

5 big stars!

Starting out in Expression Web can be intimidating - certainly it was for me. I had very little experience in HTML, a fresh copy of the program on my screen, and a major project to accomplish. Rand-Hendriksen's text turned out to be just what I needed. The first chapter ("hour 1") provides the reader with a helpful orientation to the program's workspace. But starting with chapter 2 the real strength of the text comes through as the author leads the student through the development an actual practice website (and a few related side projects). I found this "learning by doing" to be very helpful. I worked through most of the chapters/hours, only skipping one or two of the most advanced that I knew were not applicable to my project. Throughout the author proves himself to be a good teacher using both descriptive text and relevant illustrations, and only in a few places do I wish he had added further explanation. After finishing the text I was able to build a 22 page web site, featuring CSS and drop down menus.

As good as it is, the text could be strengthened in a few ways. First, it probably should include an annotated bibliography. Since the text is not a reference work, students should use it in tandem with a book of that type like Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML, and CSS which I found helpful. Nor is it a book on web artistry, for which I can appreciate (but not emulate) Jason Beaird in his The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Second, I would add a few pages at the end of the book that would function almost as checklist to help the student start out on their own project. That would make the transition seamless from practice to the real thing. Finally, with a book of this detail there are naturally some typos which I hope will be corrected in a new edition.

The book was designed to help novice web designers really get off the ground. It succeeds admirably.

I can do a web site with MS Publisher, but wanted to go to the next level. This book does not give enought clear, step by step information on opening a Page or Web Site, saving, and closing, and naming files. Downloading the files was also a problem. The book was obviously not proof read which also causes problems. I also got Beginning Expression Web and find chapters 2 and 3 very simple and easy to understand in opening, naming files, saving etc. I have to have several books to self teach and I believe once I get the basics down, Morten may pay off, but right now Beginning Expression Web is an easy step by step explanation of how to get started. Also, the early exercises lets me do some simple formating of paragraphs,fonts and even adding color which helps me to learn and holds my interest. So far Morten's weakness seems to be lack of creavity and design which is the heart of Web Page design.