Interactive Books

I love this book. It's a robust mix of exercises and software how-to, unique among all the FCP books I've read. I'm very glad to have it in my library.

I wrote this to Wolsky, might as well share it with the world:
Hi, guys. I met you at the fcpug last Weds and bought a (signed!) copy of your book. I haven't started to do the tutorial yet but I can't put the book down. It's so clear and easy to understand, and I'm already implementing the stuff I've picked up just from reading, "Now, did he say.... option X? Oh, wow, it works." It's the best book I've seen and I tend to look at everything in hopes that where one person confuses me another will set me straight. Anyway, this is a fan letter. And the writing is extraordinarily fine, literate and grammatical. Thank you.

The author is candid in his discussion about editing with Final Cut Pro. The most valuable information to me was his numerious comparisons between FCP and other editing software. For example, he points out those areas where other programs might be stronger in certain areas than FCP and specifies those programs. I read the book cover to cover and continually refer back to it as a guide and inspiratoin when editing.

Reading many, if not most, software instruction books, is akin to being clubbed by a thousand hammers...overload, overload. They are constructed as reference books, but one has to fight through tons on incidental material to figure out how to use the program.

Tom Wolsky's Final Cut Pro 2 book is, instead, a precise tool, which gets you cutting in no time. Wolsky's credits list him as an editor and a teacher, and his book make it clear he is outstanding in both regards.

At first glance you might think that this book is the same as the other FCP click-step books for the manual-adverse. You'd be wrong. Tom has crafted an excellent instructional work that richly supplements, rather than reiterates, Apple's enormous, exhaustive FCP 2 manual. Certainly he has featured many pages of clear dance-step instruction throughout the book. But, more noteworthy, Tom also incorporates a great deal of contextual insight into why certain features might be useful to the reader and draws upon his professional experience to give readers insights into the professional post-production process.

This book quickly became the mainstay of my FCP editing library. The only feature that would improve upon it is a spiral binding enabling it to lie flat while open!

Love the adorable fairies in this book. Lovely drawings, appropriate for myself and my young daughter.

True to form, this is another great book of Cicely's artwork. It's a favorite coloring book of my little girls!

I am not much on coloring books and would rather give a child a blank piece of paper and tell them to "create." But this coloring book is so much more. Full of magical fairies and pictures originally created by Cicely Mary Baker, this book helps children imagine the world of fairies. Lovely!

This is a perfectly lovely coloring book for your children. The
fairy pictures are beautiful and it is made just for fun.

My daughters and niece play together frequently. They are ages four, five, and seven. I bought extra books because they all wanted to color in the first one. I didn't think this would hold the seven year olds interest, but it has. The fairies are beautiful, just like Cicely Mary Barker's artwork, and there is a lot of variety. I like the idea of the alphabet book combined with coloring, even though the girls have long since learned their letters. They were not, however, familiar with all of the flowers, so this has been a learning tool too. Great fun and highly recommended for a variety of ages of girls.

I was going to avoid reviewing this book because I'm too close to the authors and my copy was free so I thought I would be too biased, but the book merits a stellar review...bias aside.

Generator concepts are in bite size chunks and easy to follow, yet not so easy that they bore the reader. The book follows a natural progression in complexity and will be usefull to developers of all experience levels stepping up to the Generator plate.

The level at which the author's stand in the developer community gives them the opportunity to bestow their knowledge in "we know it all" manner, but instead they maintain a humbleness that says "hey, we're just developers like you who've had a lot more time on our hands."

Chock full of all the essentials, and the non-essentials, this book is a must have for the Generator developer (or the developer wanna-be) and looks to have a long shelf life.

Chris, Phil, Mike-nice work!

Finally someone to really take the shrink wrap off two of the best tools in the business. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the eccentric behind flashenabled.com would be able to show all of us common men how to take the next step with Flash and Generator. Awesome.

I was going to avoid reviewing this book because I'm too close to the authors and my copy was free so I thought I would be too biased, but the book merits a stellar review...bias aside.

Generator concepts are in bite size chunks and easy to follow, yet not so easy that they bore the reader. The book follows a natural progression in complexity and will be usefull to developers of all experience levels stepping up to the Generator plate.

The level at which the author's stand in the developer community gives them the opportunity to bestow their knowledge in "we know it all" manner, but instead they maintain a humbleness that says "hey, we're just developers like you who've had a lot more time on our hands."

Chock full of all the essentials, and the non-essentials, this book is a must have for the Generator developer (or the developer wanna-be) and looks to have a long shelf life.

Chris, Phil, Mike-nice work!

Want to learn Generator? This is it, bar none!
As a Generator and Flash trainer I always look for good material to add to class for future reading, this book will not only top the list but will be integrated into all future classes. Having used Generator since 1.0 I thought I knew many of the tricks but this book showed me a few that I have never seen before and will use immediately.
If nothing else know that the authors are top of their game and that the material for this book matches their excellence.

This book is a must-have resource for anyone interested in working with Generator. Mike, Phillip, and Chris not only know their stuff, but they did a great job at sharing their knowledge in a way that even a novice can understand. They are able to share their real-world experience, and make using Generator just a little (maybe even a lot?) more palatable for the average Flash user.

This book served as a guide to go from not knowing anything about iMovie to being able to create a large slideshow project. I ordered another guide first and couldn't get off square one. This guide allowed me from starting at no knowledge to understanding well enough to get my job done. The iMovie icon sat on my desktop for years before this book opened it's utility. A small and worthwhile investment to get the most out of this software. It has even given me the bug to get a camcorder and move from photography to videography.

I love this book. Its so easy to read and informative that it'll suit any age! Its an easy way to get the know-how on Imovie and Idvd and also helps seasoned ammatures (like myself) brush up on the commands and answers any questions you might have.

As digital video cameras spawn in the hands of you, me, parents and tourists like cockroaches in my kitchen we find ourselves needing the kind of technical and aesthetic help not really seen since the advent of `desktop publishing'. Once again a `Missing Manual' has come to my help. `iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual' is an excellent book.

I previously reviewed iPhoto2: The Missing Manual and said "The target audience for this book would probably be a little less technical than myself, however when I find myself in a field I don't understand well I don't mind a little stuff for the absolute newbie" -- and once again this is true. iMovie 3 & iDVD: The Missing Manual finds me in an area where I am technically inferior. Once again I truly appreciated this book and its style.

The book is broken up into four sections, one devoted to video cameras and shooting a movie, a large one on editing in iMovie 3, and smaller sections on exporting out of iMovie 3 and on using iDVD. At the end are two useful appendices: the first is a menu-by-menu look at iMovie 3, and the second is an iMovie 3 troubleshooting guide. The latter is often needed and always useful -- iMovie 3 still has more than one bug.

The first section gives a great deal of incredibly useful information about video cameras and how to use them, including hints on various types of shooting such as sporting events, interviews and weddings. The technical information on cameras is perfect if you have yet to buy a camera, including a guide to which features are essential and which unnecessary as you can do the same thing (only better) in iMovie 3. When it goes on to the `how to shoot' section, you get pretty much the same advice you'll get anywhere, but since we didn't really read all of from the last book on video we read (and forgot half the bits we did read) it's nice to have it there again.

The second section does a good job of explaining the details of iMovie 3, even down to some of its shortcomings and bugs. I also appreciated the way it spent as much time on improving the quality of the finished film as it did telling me how to use the various parts of the software. It follows a logical sequence through the movie-making process, giving good details on how iMovie does the job, how to get the best result and what sort of things to avoid -- particularly useful for things like transitions and effects when less is best.

The third section, titled "Finding Your Audience," is a bit more of a problem. It really has nothing to do with finding an audience and a lot more to do with QuickTime. The section first spends ten pages telling us how to get our edited film back onto the camcorder or onto a VCR, then it spends a lot of time dealing with exporting to QuickTime, including posting movies to the web and some info on using the QuickTime player, including some "tricks" with QuickTime Player Pro.

The attention to the finished product in the second section carries through to the fourth section on iDVD, though the writing here is not quite as good. It is incredibly informative, however. I learned a great deal about putting together all sorts of iDVD projects, including ways of customizing almost every aspect of the finished product.

O'Reilly have the usual marketing stuff on their website while Pogue Press have the handy little Missing CD section with links to all the free and shareware software mentioned in the book. Neither has a sample chapter or the table of contents.

One of the drawbacks of getting free software is that we don't get good free documentation. One of the benefits of free software is that we can choose which `documentation' to buy. Some people might prefer the style of the `Dummies' books, others the style of Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide. I've had a look at all three and like the balance of depth and explanation that Pogue has in his `Missing Manual' series. I once again find myself recommending a `Missing Manual' to everyone. While catering to the beginner, this book goes deep enough that all but the most long-term user of these two pieces of software will find something to learn in this volume.

Yup. This book really made using iMovie for the first time a walk in the park.
Wiht absolutely no prior experience in this sort of stuff (the closest I've come is Photoshop Elements), I was able to, on the first try, make a music video of my son's first christmas.
I was then able to convert an old videotape from the late 70's into a gleaming, groovy DVD.
The book is well laid out, easy to navigate and above all, usable.
It's a five-star manual, no doubt about it.

I bought this book as an afterthought when I started using I-Movie. At first, like most of us, I thought--hey, I can use I-movie intuitively without a manual...but after my Imovie 3.0 crashed and corrupted the movie I'd been working on for 100+ hours, I was eternally grateful to have it nearby. This manual is wonderfully organized, very easy-to-understand, and answers virtually every question you could have about I-Movie and I-DVD. It walks you through everything from how to shoot footage that is eye-appealing...to editing it to a work-of-art in I-movie...to converting it to a Quicktime video and/or burning it to DVD. It is honestly one of the best manuals I've ever used for anything---clear, concise, yet comprehensive. Thanksfully, you don't need to read the whole book in order to "get started" with I-movie; rather, it's a great tool to pick up on an "as needed" basis while you're editing. This book is definitely worth the small investment. It truly is "the missing manual" for I-movie. O'Reilley has done it again...great job!

THIS BOOK IS ABESOLUTELY SENSATIONAL!! I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE BIBLE UNTIL I READ THIS. I WOULD LIKE TO THANK JOHN DEEM FOR PUBLISHING SUCH A TRULY TOUCHING BOOK.

Love the book, its format and the fun involved in exploring both the Bible and one's faith issues. Move over tabloids, this journalist/scholar is taking over. Buy it, read it and form a class to study it together. Great stuff for the average joe or the person who has every version of the Bible!

What a book! Makes one sit up and say what great stories. I have read these stories many times in the Bible but now I really understand them. Can`t wait to share my book with someone. Mary Ritzenthaler Oregon Ohio

I laughed until I cried, but most importantly, I walked away with a unique perspective of Bible stories that are truly amazing. This book brings the stories to life and provides great lessons to further any faith journey.

A wonderful book written in a most unusual manner. Thought provoking and inspirational. A great book for individual or group study. It makes you laugh and, most importantly, think! A blessed addition to the home library.

I can rarely find Backyardigans merchandise for my son who just loves these guys! This book is really colorful and he just adores it! I highly recommend it for all Backyardigan fans!

I read a lot of books to my son, but he's not always too interested in actually looking at them. For some reason, he just loves this book. I think the bright colors capture his attention - very well done. Also, I like the padded cover and rounded corners, as my son loves to hold and chew on the books!!

My grandson loves anything backyardigans so I had to buy this book. It's small enough to fit in a diaper bag very colorful and there are enough details in the pictures that you can sit and point things out. Great for when you are stuck waiting someplace.

"Jungle Colors" is a simple but fun board-book featuring your backyard friends, The Backyardigans. In this book, the Backyardigans are on a jungle adventure, much like some of the ones seen on TV. But this jungle adventure is especially colorful. They encounter various colors as they make their journey, from brown to fabulous red rubies.

The colors are bright and cheerful. The illustrations go well with the fairly simply text. A nice book for basic learning about colors or for Backyardigans fans.This is a "Super Chubby" board-book by Simon Spotlight. That means that the front and back covers have a sort of squishy feel to them and the book won't easily slip out of little kids' hands.

Jungle Colors, feauring the Backyardigans, is a fun adventure. The Backyardigans explore the jungle, and the colors brown, purple, blue, white, yellow, green, black, orange, pink, red and gray. The book is well made and sturdy, a fun read for both adult and child.

Great book for my purposes -- to use in a pre-school music class.

This book is absolutely adorable!!! A very sweet valentine book with fun, colorful pop-ups and a sweet valentine poem!! Such a great book!!!

I bought this book for my son this past Valentine's Day. He had gotten Halloween Bugs in October and had enjoyed that one so much I thought I would be good for him to have another.

Since my son is 2 we had to explain to him that you do not pull the flowers out. Once we got past that, he seemed to be content with leaving the pop-ups in the book. When we got finished reading it the first time he demanded that we read it again. Even after the tenth time in a row he did not get tired of it. I find I have to hide it sometimes in order to not have to read it 20 times in the same sitting, but it never gets old watching him enjoy it so much.

I bought this book years ago for my now 9 yr old,. Now my 3 yr old has rediscovered all of Carter's books & loves them. She is a girly girl & is usually afraid of bugs but these bugs are so cute, she loves them. Of course as with most pop-up books,it is short & fragile-not for the very young to play with on their own. But it is a must-have for anyone with kids.

The cutest valentine book ever! The pop ups are wonderfully designed and it is a real attention getter! My only complaint is that the book isn't longer!! I would love to see more!

This book gives you a broad scope of the to be used topics when creating elearning sites. You will get a quick tutorial of the most important Macromedia features to get the process done. In a clear way building up from using templates, attaching stylesheets, showing and hiding layers with Dreamweaver and using Flash for simulation and user-interactivity the book introduces the interaction with databases by using Coldfusion.

I thought Coldfusion was rather difficult to learn, because the tips of the week by Macromedia were a little to quick for me. But Jeffrey Bardzell proved it is easy. In a straight-forward way you are taken by the hand to take all the basic steps for building a data-driven website.

I'm an assoc. prof. of New Testament currently working to produce an interactive web workbook for teaching/learning skills for New Testament interpretation. I want to give students practice developing close reading skills rather than ask them simply to drill content. For a couple of years, I have had a dream for such a site, and I felt sure it was buildable, but didn't know how. I care enough about how the interactions work and the relationship of content to design that I wanted to design the interactions myself if possible. Yet I didn't know anything but a little Dreamweaver and its CourseBuilder extension.

Working my way through a copy of Macromedia MX eLearning is changing all that. Wow! The book teaches how to develop interactions in Dreamweaver and Flash as well as offering several chapters on putting ColdFusion to work in eLearning. Each chapter includes a fine combination of hands-on work and explanation for why we are being asked to do what we're doing, especially at those places where some task is counter-intuitive. The book is also free of mistakes, typos and muddled language, a welcome plus when so many computer books seem to have been rushed to press without having been edited or proofed.

Bardzell's book is giving me two things: (1) hands on work with the software that introduces and reinforces learning without devolving into busywork and (2) a model for developing materials (like the book itself) that teach effectively from a distance. A+

I am a trainer and instructional designer at a university. I thought this book was very useful in helping me to use Flash MX for education. You would likely need some introductory training in Flash and Dreamweaver basics before using this book.

This is an excellent book where you learn how to integrate ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Flash MX by building interactive learning applications. The exercises are explained in great details and contain many tips and techniques especially for Dreamweaver and Flash. The newer aspects of interacting ColdFusion MX with Flash MX are not covered, but for those of us still using ColdFusion 5 there is a good coverage of LoadVars. I recommend this book without any reservation as it is one of the best technical books I have read so far.

Jeffrey Bardzell's book is intelligently written with plenty easy-to-understand examples. He engages, inspires, and motivates learners throughout. His Dante's Inferno project makes learning fun. He breaks subject matter down into comprehendible pieces, using Aristotelian logic in places. This guy knows what he's doing. Of several computer books that I have purchased over the years, this is the first time I have written a review. You can learn eLearning and website design, and this book will teach you how-even if you are a motivated beginner, technical type, or humanities person-this book is suited for most everyone.

I would say that it is a very informative book and an easy read.
I read over half the book in 3 days. I would recommend this book for all to have in their reference library.
It's worth keeping near your Pro Tools rig

Wow! I'm an intermediate PTLE user, and this book blew me away. Now I know what's been missing from my mixes, and what to do about it.

This is not a book for beginners, although the initial section on setting Preferences for professional workflow is something I'd never seen covered in any other basic PT book. The authors explain WHY certain preference settings make your life easier or harder, and where certain settings can cause PT to behave in unexpected ways. The other feature for beginners is to show what to aim for in the way of pro quality results. However, the book assumes that the song, arrangement, playing, tracking, and basic mixing (EQ, comp, volume/mutes, panning, etc.) has been done to a reasonable quality level. The material covers the last 10% of tightening the rhythm and fixing any vocal glitches that separate a potential gold-record result from a semi-pro effort.

After getting the book, I went into a session I'm doing with some rather complex rhythm parts over a synth drum loop. After "pocketing" the parts, the song now sounds much crisper and more alive, but not mechanical. (NOW I know why I should have recorded the loop to a grid, and driven the synth from PT's clock. Oh well...) My next step will be to clean up the vocals, using the book's suggestions for using Auto Tune. Now I understand why I was always a bit dissatisfied with Auto Tune, even in Graphic mode.

Overall, the book is very well written and edited, and covers not just the easy situations but tells you how to handle a number of real-world oddities. Most of the text is accompanied by screen shots (including before / after, where appropriate.) The DVD is also very helpful, and I found myself really understanding material by referring between the text and the DVD.

I'm advanced ProTools User.
This book is more about Nathan particular techniques.
Dont adds much to me maybe works better to you.

Being a professional Recording Engineer in the music industry for 23 years and having used Pro Tools for the last 3 years, finally there is a book written that offers some useful and valuable information. Mostly all of the other Pro Tools books are written for beginners and intermediate users. They seem like edited down versions of the Digidesign documentation that already ships with Pro Tools. The most valuable part of the book to me was showing where to separate audio events before time stretching them. You always want to preserve the transient of the sound and the authors have some very good tips on how to best preserve the original piece of audio. Though editing is the tedious process that many hate to do, it many times is the difference between a good recording and a major label quality recording.

I am a songwriter and have a home studio where I demo my songs. Even though I know the mechanics of using pro tools, I was missing the practical knowledge of how to apply all of the nuts and bolts. This book and the other dvds by this same publisher do just that. You are sitting right there next to the engineer with actual raw studio tracks going through the entire post production process. The accomanying DVD/ROM provides you with narration and actual pro tools screen shots so you see and hear what the engineer is doing. This book covers editing and pocketing in extreme detail. I now appreciate pocketing - a term I had heard but never really understood with respect to post production. Now I KNOW how the records I hear sound so insanely tight. There are a lot of tweaks done in post and this book shows you how to do it. The autotuning chapter also is excellent. After so many disappointments with other books that basically rehashed the user's guide this book and all of the other Multi-Platinum Pro Tools products were exactly what I was looking for. They have been my rosetta stone to pro tools. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Get it!

This book is so much fun to read. The moveable parts make learning about driving a taxi not only interesting, but educational as well. My son loves reading this book! The only drawback is while it is more durable than standard books of its kind, it's still capable of damage which we've seen over time. It's probably best to keep this one on the shelf and let your little one read it with your supervision. Trust me-it's a keeper and you'll want to take good care of it!

The book is excellent for young children who have taken an interest in cars. The book is fragile though, and should be used with a parent present.

My son loves this book! We got it a year ago after he turned three. It has survived the year and is still a favorite. It is very well made and extremely entertaining!

I ordered this book since I am going to a Children's Book workshop this Summer and the author is speaking. Very cleaver book with lots of moving parts and good language use. Great fun to share with a grandson.

My boys loved the little red toolbox--My Little Yellow Taxi did not disappoint! The pieces are pretty stiff initially, but are so much fun for them to play pretend with. Like the toolbox, the book is cardboard, so it does wear. But that does not deter them from filling the taxi up with gas, or using the key to start the engine. A great book for car trips!