Independent Learning Exercises.

There are two lines of independent study for you to pursue this week:

1. Initial exploration of Dreamweaver.
2. Finding out about methodical approaches to software development.

The first of these has the highest priority.

1. Exploring Dreamweaver.

Since you are experienced in creating raw HTML, and in the use of another Macromedia tool (Flash), you should have little difficulty in learning to use Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver comes with a comprehensive help and tutorial system, so there is no particular need to use third party documentation. If you do need a book then I would suggest the guide published by Peachpit Press. For the time being I would suggest by-passing Dreamweaver's site management facilities (although these are useful for a 'real world' project) and concentrate on page creation - I would therefore skip their introductory tutorial, which starts with site management. Perhaps you could set yourself the goal of re-creating one of your 'Design for the Internet' pages in Dreamweaver.

2. Software Development Methodologies.

Software development methodologies may be crudely divided into two types, based on their underlying model of the software development process:

• Methodologies based on the 'waterfall' model, which assume that software development is predominantly linear, moving steadily from requirements to finished product.
• Methodologies based on the 'prototyping' or 'spiral' model, which assume that software development is a gradual, cyclic process of design, production and improvement.

Use some of the keywords in the brief outlines above and search the web, or the library, for further material on these two models, and when each is most useful. Which model do you think is most appropriate for the kinds of multimedia tasks in which you have been involved?