The great irony of Dreamweaver CS6 is that its GUI generated mediocre, bloated code. If you let the Design View run wild, you would get nested <font> tags and spacer GIFs. The tutorial implicitly admits this by pushing users toward "Code View." Over the 500 pages of the PDF, a shift occurs: the student starts using Design View less and the native code editor more. By Chapter 12, the PDF is just teaching CSS syntax. Dreamweaver, the visual tool, eventually taught its users that the visual tool was a crutch. The PDF is a long, 50,000-word apology for its own existence.

The most fascinating chapter in the PDF is likely the one on Adobe attempted to create a drag-and-drop interface for displaying XML and JSON data without writing JavaScript. It failed spectacularly (Spry is now a zombie technology), but the ambition is instructive. The tutorial reveals that even in 2012, Adobe knew the static brochure site was dying. They knew the web needed to be dynamic. They just couldn't predict that the solution would be Node.js, API calls, and single-page applications built by developers who have never used a "Property Inspector."

What, then, is the modern web developer to do with this PDF?