Hi everyone, i recently installed Dreamweaver CS3 and bought a book to help get myself upto speed.

I do not know any programming languages, however i have done, at a beginner level, html, c++, VB, and java. So i have a fair understanding of basic concepts. This has in the past allowed me to work with pre-generated (either user or program) code and manipulate and build upon it. Typically the process of doing so is painful and timestaking...but i eventually sort things out.

That being said it looks like DW can be used completely from a visual design aspect to make relatively professional looking sites.

With my background and the tools availible to me, am i better off teaching myself things like html, css, xml, etc or is it possible to make complete sites from visual design in DW?

With my background and the tools availible to me, am i better off teaching myself things like html, css, xml, etc or is it possible to make complete sites from visual design in DW?

Both are possible BUT learning the various languages and markup and being able to hand code means you would be able to sort out the mess when visual design tools get it wrong or cannot handle the design.

While DWCS3 is better than it's predecessors, left on it's own it still writes some really horrible code. For this reason, as Chris suggested, it's best to learn to code HTML and CSS from scratch. Once you do, you'll know how to clean up the messes and fix it when things go wrong with just Design View.

I see, well aside from some buggy code, is there anything that DW cannot do in Design veiw that has to be done using coding?

Lots!

DB queries being one of them. A good DBA can optimise tables and queries to suit the needs of the system.
WYSIWYG design tools are limited to what the original programmers came up with.

and personally I just wouldn't let some unknown entity decide what my code was going to be or do.