This question always starts the flaming!
Everybody has different styles and ways of learning. I like to think that I am fairly smart, but trying to learn how to create tables using notepad and reading from a book practically gave me a brain tumor. Letting FrontPage do the coding, then looking at it to see what tags matched up with what was shown in the browser, made it much easier for me to learn. In my experience, FrontPage adds some icky stuff to the HTML, and leaves some other stuff out. It doesn't really hurt anything (except synchronicity's elitist attitudes) to have that extra stuff in there. Once you learn what everything is, you can remove the junk with no ill effects. Also, even though I've been creating web sites for a few years now, I still use FrontPage. For making simple pages it does a fine job with no extra coding required, and although most of the pages I create now are ASP (Frontpage doesn't help or hurt the coding, it works just like Notepad in that case), it still is nice because FrontPage can update all the hyperlinks to a page if I change a filename, and one-button publishing to the web is good, too. There are other subtle things that are nice, and a few that are frustrating, too.
I haven't tried Dreamweaver because a 30MB download of the trial version is no fun on a 56k dial-up, and $400 for the program is a little steep.