Beginning Expression Web

This book contains a good mixture of practical skills, technical information, and best practices for web design. As an earlier review noted, there are not many books available for Expression Web yet, so not much to compare with. Zak has done a good job of organizing the content in this book. Don't let the word "beginning" fool you; in addition to covering the basics, there are some moderately advanced topics in this book, for which I am grateful.

I'll start with my only real con: the downloadable content. The author provides the "beginning" and "completed" source so you can compare the pages before and after. There wasn't any chapter 4 content to follow with the book. The author instructs you to load the files for the chapter you're on and then proceeds to step through the page creation. However, there are several chapters that have the content completed in full for the "Beginning" content. I had to delete the stuff on the page before I began the lesson. Minor quip now that I worked through it but it was frustrating in the beginning trying to follow along. That aside, there aren't many books out yet for this software. After completing this book I felt it was the right choice for the beginner developer or anyone wanting to get a leg up on how Expression works. The examples for the most part were very well explained and made the learning process very simple. The author touches on all the important topics from CSS page design, database connections, login controls for security, as well as the more run of the mill items like, inserting images, hyperlinks, javascript actions for mouse overs, etc. If you're a beginner to web design and wish to use Expression, I feel this is the best first book. The other two books I have are Using Expression Web and Foundations of Expression Web. From a beginner's point of view I have to say Using Expression Web is a tidbit book. It's something I'll use for reference and/or an overview of specific examples. It's not something I'd recommend for anyone to learn the software ground up. I just finished Beginning Expression Web so I haven't dug into Foundations of Expression just yet. I'm expecting it to be similar to this book but covering a couple of different topics, specifically Dynamic Web Templates and master pages.