How to Do Everything with FrontPage 2002 By: David Plotkin Publisher: Osborne/Mcgraw-Hill  2001

Review by Andrew Novick

Summary: A basic book with step-by-step instructions for using Microsoft's Frontpage 2002

Sort of like the title says, How to Do Everything with FrontPage 2002 tries to show you how to use all of the features of Microsoft's FrontPage 2002 Web site development product.  It is really more feature oriented than task oriented.  Rather than set out a set of tasks and show how to accomplish each, it shows each of the features and how to use each to develop your site.

This book is targeted at beginner users of FrontPage 2002.  It assumes very little about the reader's level of sophistication with computer applications although a basic familiarity with Office and the Web would be a big help.

One of the topics that is studiously avoided is HTML.  After all, the typical user buys FrontPage so that they don't have to code in HTML.  If you're really interested in what's going on behind the scenes, you won't find it in this book.

Another topic that doesn't get sufficient coverage is troubleshooting.  Does everything work for you the first time? ... Not for me either.  If it all works the first time, great.  But designing a Web in FrontPage is no different from other complex tasks and there are always problems.  For example, overlapping instructions from shared boarders, themes, and styles can make it nearly impossible to tell where some of the page formatting originated.  It's sometimes difficult to figure out where something is coming from and how to set an option so that it takes effect on the entire web.

Overall I found How to Do Everything with FrontPage 2002 more basic than I needed.  If you're starting from scratch and have the patience to read most of it, it might be for you.  If you're a more advanced user, you might look elsewhere.

One interesting development is a digital version that you can download from Amazon.  It costs as much as the paperback version but you can have it in minutes.