Northchild - 9:30 pm on Jun 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

My story might be interesting. I started designing basic sites a couple of years ago with Microsoft's FrontPage. I got frustrated fairly quickly with the lack of layout options, and within a month I had switched to Flash with ActionScript for all of my web site design.

Last month, I wanted to start learning more about server-side development with Flash, so I picked up a book or two. I also want to be a professional graphic designer late next spring, so I figured there's nothing more for it, I have to learn HTML and Dreamweaver. I bought a student version of Dreamweaver MX, a Teach Yourself XHTML in 24 hours book, and a Dreamweaver MX Training from the Source book. A week later I'm finally comfortable with both HTML and Dreamweaver. CSS outside of Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG environment is going to require some more work and practice for me, (as is PHP/MySQL), but overall I'd say that both HTML and Dreamweaver are elementary stuff.

Student versions of Dreamweaver MX are priced at $100 US. The books for Dreamweaver and XHTML are another $50 US used at Amazon. If you're taking college courses for this sort of thing, any money that you spend on hardware, software, or training is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to your college costs and will be well worth it in the long run if you have the discipline to see the training guides through. Macromedia's pricing is especially easy on the student pocketbook when compared with Adobe's.