Graphics Illustrators Books

I have read over 7 books in the Quickstart series. All of them have been very well written and has made me buy one after the other. I ordered this book to start and learn Illustrator 7. It does teach you alot about the program but... All the examples are dull and dry! I am a very patient reader, but I found myself looking at the clock and dreading the time everyday when I made my self sit down and read the book. She also overloads you with information on the program. Hopefully the WOW! Illustrator book will give me the info I need to learn the never ending knowledge for great web graphics=D

This book is Great for beginners, but I am an advanced user and need something more advanced.;-)

I had real problems in getting started with Illustrator. Therefore I ordered two books to make a private course. This book was not the one which made me getting started. In fact I have just browsed through it - it is just standing in my bookshelf as being not interesting enough. It may be a good book when you already know the basics in Illustrator and want to get more out of Illustrator. In fact I do not need to do that for my present type of work. The book that made me getting started was "Teach yourself Illustrator 7 in 24 hours".

These books are designed to be used as a quick reference. Not a classroom in a book. I noticed another reviewer mentioned he was an advanced user and didn't find the book useful. Quite frankly, if your that advanced I really don't see why you would need a reference manual. This is excellent to have around if you forget someting and need the information quickly. I did find the Quark visual quick start to be a little more informative...

This has to be the ultimate guide for Illustrator as it covers everything. I liked the tutorials best since I could follow along and learn by "doing" the projects. It seemed overwelming at first because the book is so huge, but I just picked what I needed from the index and then it worked great for me.

All of the functions of Illustrator are covered here, and they are reasonably well explained. But most of the book is in black and white, and the examples are pretty cheesy. The color insert section is there but it is dedicated to the display of some artists. What's sad is that the art in the insert is far better than what is in the example. I look for a book like this to both teach and inspire. It certainly taught the technique, but didn't inspire with it's form.

Unfortunately this book failed to live up to its potential. For a beginner, the information is sparce and difficult to follow. For someone more experienced, the topics contained are much too basic. The text is vague and tedious to follow and was poorly proofread. The graphics are basic and contribute much less to the book than they should. Other books in the Bible series are worth reading but this is not one of them (definitely check out any of the books by Deke McClelland). There are many items that are not covered or are given just a passing mention. For the size of the book, it contains much less solid content than it could. All in all, I was very let down by this book and would recommend others to look elsewhere.

Once again, this revised edition is truly the Bible on all Illustrator topics. Keep it by your computer. This book has great in-depth coverage of all Illustrator features, including Illustrator's new 3D capabilities, and is chock full of helpful mini-tutorials.

I've had Adobe Illustrator 9 for almost a year and still haven't gotten completely through Deke McClelland's Real World Illustrator 9 book. I recently upgraded to Illustrator 10 and started reading Adobe's User Guide, which as usual is not all that great for beginners. Sam's Illustrator 10 book is actually very helpful for those never having used Illustrator before, which I haven't (although I am experienced in Photoshop). The book could be helped with a CD and color diagrams, but otherwise it is a straightforward instruction book that is easy to read. It gives both the Mac and Windows versions when there are differences. Overall I'm satisfied, especially since I got it on sale at Amazon and it's currently the only Illustrator 10 book available.

I liken this book to a book on how to work on cars. They start the book with an nice paced introduction and before you know it they start jumping all over the place....Ok here is where the oil goes and then if you want to overhual the transmission here is what you do and then here's how to change the windshield wipers and here's how to overhaul the engine. Advanced techincal areas are intermingled with simpler beginner techniques throughout the book. I was especially disappointed in the small areas of the book devoted to the use of text. Kind of interesting since a quote from the book is that text is a powerful way of graphic expression. Of the 554 pages they devote 30 to the use of text.

I have been impressed with the SAMS books in the past but this one is a dud.

There were so many mistakes (especially pages 20-22) that I have to double check everything I read from there on. And there are no corrections posted on the publisher's web page for the book so they either think the book's error free or they just don't care. I emailed them and asked if there was an errata page and got one of those replies you often receive from big companies that showed they didn't even really read my email in the first place.

I liked this book. Precise, easy-to-follow, and a page turner. I'm interested by graphic design, and is Illustrator 10 is one of vector programs. This book is recommended if you plan to know anything about the new version.

An extremely well presented, and surprisingly complete inroduction to Adobe Photoshop 6. The organization of material and page layout are outstanding, together with spiral binding and "place-mark" cover create an extremely user-friendly courseware. The focus is on essential real-world applications of the software, not special effects. Much more than an exercise book, this book will continue to serve as a reference long after the "course" is completed. Of the Photoshop introductory courseware I've seen, this is the best.

This is a horribly written book, flawed by numerous instruction errors and miserable Quality Control and editing by the publisher. The premise and idea of this series is commendable, but as someone who teaches After Effects and Premiere, this was a sad experiment. I much prefer Adobe's Classroom in a Book, and I generally find much better third party titles than Adobe's. If possible, wait for more titles for the new version 6.5 to come out... authors will have had more time to catch up to the program than this particular volume.

Whenever I work through a software tutorial, I inevitably find that some of my questions are not answered. This one is no exception but it does a better than average job. Along the way, I learned a lot that is probably good for me but which I had no pressing need to know. That is a good thing.

The book works systematically through most major topics with Pagemaker 7 and gives plenty of background information. Along the way, tutorials emphasize the important points and it was encouraging to actually get things done. The files that are needed are provided on the accompanying CD and were generally as depicted in the text; this is an exception to the general rule in my experience and very much appreciated.

All in all, I cannot claim competence in Pagemaker yet but I am a long way closer than I was when I started this tutorial 3 days ago.

This book gets started immediately with tutorials so you have to know your way around Illustrator basics before starting with this book. Once I did get started though, there is so much material crammed into this book to work through, it's going to take me a while. There is wide range of tutorials on specific projets, not just the new tools in cs, and three large advanced projects at the end of the book. I'm learning how to create great images and how to use the new cs features as I work through. Another plus is the author supporting the book and every source file for the tutorials is downloadable.

I was expecting a tutorial book with new ideas and findings, or at least improved short cut tutorials for the existing ones but the content was too elementary.

This book jumped right in with tutorials, which was fine with me since I wasn't looking for a "learn Illustrator" book. Many of the tutorials were pretty good, but there wasn't quite as much variety as I would have liked. I guess I was hoping for a few more projects that would "inspire" me and get me going with new ideas.
Friends of Ed continue to bring out books that are full of promise but don't quite live up to my expectations.
Still, it's not bad and I hope Matt writes more books and "lets go" even more with cool ideas.

All the tips are great for beginners. I am a professional and found only 5% of the book helpful. Not worth the money for only learning 5%. Most of the tips I already knew. For sure it's a beginners book. I have to say after reading through it ONLY once......the book binder fell completely apart! The glue on the binder did not hold up at all. Now all the pages are falling out. TERRIBLE!

I'd say as a Production Coordinator I'm an intermediate user of Adobe Illustrator CS2. So I didn't need a book w/ too much basic training, although this book is pretty good ad providing you with the exact step-by-step procedures for carrying out certain "Killer Tips." This is a very good all-around book for Illustrator CS2. Above all, there are so many CS2 shortcuts in this book that the average CS2 user wouldn't know. I'd recommend this book to anyone that is looking to extend their knowledge of Illustrator. It's smart and succinct. It's comfortable to carry around - won't way you down, and best of all it's really inexpensive!

Straight-to-the-point, clear & practical. Something useful for any user of Illustrator.

I am learning illustrator for the first time and found this book to extremely helpful. If you are struggling with illustrator, you need to buy this book!!

This manual provides someone just getting started using Illustrator with clear explanations for each menu option, tool, and function, along with step-by-step instructions on how to use them. All the other manuals inevitably assume that the reader is familiar with earlier versions of Illustrator and take too much for granted. The tool-by-tool organization and step-by-step instructions of this manual are refreshingly clear and specific, and tell the reader exactly how to use this powerful software.

I buy books to use for the online and classroom classes that I teach. I have used a number of the Visual Quickstart Guide books because my students love them and they really cover the material well. I purchased this book for versions CS, CS2 and CS3 and as I started to develop the class I realized that there were no example files with the book. Usually the author tells you where you can download the examples from. Since many of their examples start from content that is already created, it makes it very hard for a student who like to use hands-on to follow along in the book to do so. I tried contacting the publisher to see if there was any way to get the files but I have yet to receive a reponse.

It's a good reference, but I don't recommend it as an aid to learning the application.

This book was purchased for a class but i has since referred to it for many projects

This book is just flat out bad. The "techniques" given are nothing more than executing a couple features in the program (i.e. things you would discover on your own after playing around for say...5 minutes).

It is almost robbery to have a $40 list price on this book. There are reference books out there going for half the price as this, and they're MUCH more thorough.

Do yourself a favor and buy ANY other Illustrator book besides this one.

Adobe Illustrator for Fashion Design is a necessary tool for anyone studying fashion design. I am currently working in the Fashion Industry for a major designer, and use all of the Illustrator techniques I've learned in this book on a daily basis. All of the concepts are well organized with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. I love this book!

I found that this book has so much information its difficult to follow in a structured fashion. The pros are the fact that it has lots of content, the cons are the fact that it seems to try to throw everything at the reader at once. Also, I find the sketches very amateurish and juvenile compared to other illustrator books for fashion. As someone working in the fashion industry for more than 20 years I would demand more professional sketches for flats and on the figure.

well it was a very well detailed book and i recomend it full

This book has some good step by step instruction, but you must know the program to take advantage of these instructions. I also felt the book was somewhat misleading as far as the types of tutorials the author was going to present. The pictures and artwork are awesome, but the instructions only pertained to one element of the artwork. I thought more of how to create these images would have been in this book. Also, poor editing, as some of the instructions did not match the images. Although I felt a little cheated, I was able to put some of the information to use.