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May 25
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We wrote this book to make our favorite hobby game more accessible to every fantasy and gaming fan, from the novice who enjoys fantasy novels such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and has a passing curiosity about DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, to the seasoned D&D player who goes to every convention and has been playing since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the original White Box version of the game. Whether you have yet to play your first game or have been in a regular gaming group for years, our mission is to measurably increase the fun you have playing D&D and your proficiency with the game. As a new player, this book shows you the basics of the game. You end up with a character to play and enough understanding to confidently take your place at any gaming table. Read this book today, grab a copy of the D&D PlayerÕs Handbook, and you can play tomorrow without worry or confusion. D&D is a game. Games are fun. We hope to make learning to play fun, too. For experienced players, we provide hints and tips to elevate your level of play. Character creation, character advancement, combat and encounter strategies, gamemastering Ñ we cover it all. It doesnÕt matter if youÕve played once or a hundred times; you can find something in this book to make you a better D&D player or gamemaster (known as a Dungeon Master in D&D lingo).
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TaGs: Dragons, Dummies, Dungeons, Educational, Game Development
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I’ve been writing about Macromedia Dreamweaver since the first version came out in the mid 1990s, and I’m pleased to say that this latest (and long-awaited) version 8 makes this program better than ever. If you’ve never used Dreamweaver before, don’t worry; this book shows you everything you need to know about the old features, as well as the new ones. If you have used earlier versions of Dreamweaver, it’s definitely time to upgrade and make sure you have all the tools available to create a fabulous Web site. If you’re like most of the Web designers I know, you don’t have time to wade through a thick book before you start working on your Web site. That’s why I wrote Dreamweaver 8 For Dummies in a way that makes it easy for you to find the answers you need quickly. You don’t have to read this book cover to cover. If you’re in a hurry, just go right to the information you need most and get back to work. If you’re new to Web design, or you want to really get to know the intricacies of Dreamweaver, skim through the chapters to get an overview and then go back and read what’s most relevant to your project in greater detail. Whether you are building a simple site for the first time or working to redesign a complex site for the umpteenth time, you find everything you need in these pages.
If marketing folks want to breathe new life into an existing technology, the method du jour is to tack “digital” onto the name. Today we have digital cable, digital cell phones, digital fuel injection, and now, digital video. But unlike some other technologies that have recently earned the digital prefix, digital video isn’t just a minor improvement over the old way of doing things. Digital video is a revolution that is changing the way we think about and use moving pictures. Regular folks have had the capability to record their own video for many years now. Affordable film movie cameras have been available since the 1950s, and video cameras that record directly onto videotape have been with us for over two decades. But after you recorded some video or film with one of these old cameras, you couldn’t do much else with it. You could show your movies to friends and family in raw, unedited form, but there was no confusing your rough home movie with a professional Hollywood production. Digital camcorders provide a slight quality improvement over older camcorders, but the real advantage of digital video is that you can now easily edit your video on a computer. I don’t have to tell you how far computer technology has progressed over the last few years, and you know that modern Macs and PCs can now do some pretty amazing things. In a matter of seconds, you can import video from your digital camcorder into your computer, cut out the scenes you don’t want, add some special effects, and then instantly send your movies to friends over the Internet — or burn them to a DVD. The capability to easily edit your own movies adds a whole new level of creativity that was — just five years ago — the exclusive realm of broadcast and movie professionals. In a culture so accustomed to and influenced by video images, it’s actually kind of surprising that personal moviemaking hasn’t burgeoned sooner. Video is the art of our time, and now — at last — you have the power to use this art for your own expression. What will you draw on your digital-video canvas?
Like anything else, digital photography is easy — if you know what you’re doing. It’s getting to the point of knowing what you’re doing that can be frustrating. This book gives you the little bit of help you need. The steps for using this book are:
In this book, I cover the art form of digital art photography. I start by giving you an introduction to the world of film-based photography and how it relates to digital photography. From there, I go on to cover the whole gambit of digital art photography, from shooting great photos to tweaking them in Photoshop to producing final output fit for a gallery wall. If that sounds intriguing, this book is for you whether you’re film-based or digital-only or both.
Welcome to the world of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS, you can design gorgeous and highly effective Web sites. CSS offers power and flexibility to Web site developers and designers. This book shows you how to use CSS to make your Web pages come alive. Marketing experts like to say that the box helps sell the jewelry. CSS does several useful things, but one of the most important is to help you design much more attractive packages to hold your Web page contents.
It may be hard to remember, or it may seem like only yesterday, but some years ago, the personal computer was introduced. The rise and rise and rise of the personal computer — with maybe an occasional stumble but never a real fall — seemed certain to be the most important social and technological event at the end of the twentieth century. From Wozniak and Jobs’s Apple II to Bill Gates’s Windows 95, nothing, it seemed could ever be bigger, or more life-changing and important, than PCs. But, people do talk. In fact, talking is one of the main things that people are all about, and in the beginning, the personal computer didn’t let you interact with others. However, first with modems, and then with networks, and finally through their combination and culmination in the Internet, personal computers became the tools that opened up a new medium of communication. The most visible and exciting part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. Now communication, not computation, is the story. Computers are still important, but mostly as the means to an end; the end result is to enable people to interact. If the most exciting channel of communication is the Web, the means of communication is the Web page. Ordinary people demonstrate amazing energy and imagination in creating and publishing diverse Web home pages. And although ordinary people have a desire to create Web pages, businesses have a need to set up shop on the Web. So the rush to the Web continues, often with the same people expressing themselves personally on one Web page and commercially on another. So you want to be there, too. “But,” you ask, “Isn’t it difficult, expensive, and complicated?” Not any more. As the Web has grown, easy ways to get on the Web have appeared. And we discuss the best of them in the pages of this book.
The Creating Web Pages All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is intended to be a reference for all the great things (and maybe a few not-so-great things) that you may need to know when you’re creating or expanding a Web site — from designing a cool-looking page to creating multimedia effects and e-commerce capability. Of course, you could go out and buy a book on each of these Web-development-related topics, but why would you want to when they’re all conveniently packaged for you in this handy reference? Creating Web Pages All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive reference for every last detail of all things Web. Instead, this book shows you how to get up and running fast so that you have more time to do the things that you really want to do. Designed using the easy-to-follow For Dummies format, this book helps you get the information you need without laboring to find it.
If your family is like most of the families I know, you don’t have time to wade through a thick book before you start working on your Web site. That’s why I wrote Creating Family Web Sites For Dummies in a way that makes it easy for you to find the answers you need quickly. You don’t have to memorize this book or even read it in order. Each section is designed to stand alone, giving you easy answers to particular questions and step-by-step instructions for specific tasks. The first part of the book will help you master the basics, from registering a domain name to taking the red out of someone’s eyes in a photo to creating a custom Web page. In the second part of the book, project-specific chapters show you how to use predesigned template pages to develop some of the most popular family Web sites: baby sites, wedding sites, travel sites, and hobby sites. The CD that comes with this book has all the templates and graphics, and each corresponding chapter includes step-by-step instructions to help you customize the pages and images. If you’re in a rush to get a baby site or a wedding site up and running, go directly to the specific chapter and you should find everything you need. Don’t worry about memorizing the new technical terms you find in this book. I’ve tried to keep the tech-talk to a minimum, but if you don’t understand a word, turn to the glossary in the back. Feel free to dog-ear the pages, too — I promise they won’t complain!
Acomputer is nothing but a tool. It’s bigger than a hammer (well, most hammers), heavier than a screwdriver, and generally less noisy than a circular saw — but is nonetheless a tool. You can do more stuff with a computer than you can with a hammer and a screwdriver, but hammers and screwdrivers are simpler to use and easier to clean up. (Circular saws are another story; things can get messy really fast.) Your computer does get messy; have no doubt about it. Programs load and unload, files pop into existence and then slither off to unknown parts of your hard drive, and spyware tries to adhere itself to your operating system. Every day your system changes, as information is added and new demands are placed on old programs. All these things add to the unique clutter that comes to define and weigh down your system. You can redefine your system and free your system, all by identifying and removing the clutter. Cleaning Windows XP For Dummies shows you how.
