Desktop Publishing Books

I own THREE other Flash books AND took a 2 Day course a year ago, and this book has taught me more than all the others combined in my first day of use. Well written, easy to follow, the lessons are in a LOGICAL order that make sense to someone who does not know Flash. Terrific book if you need to learn Flash. I wish I had found it before I wasted time and money on the other books and the course! You won't waste your money with this one. I wish Adobe would hire this guy...he understands Flash and knows how to explain it.

Hi, I'm using this textbook in a classroom with some Grade 10 students, and to teach myself Flash as well. I find the book good over all, but some of the exercises have been difficult.The instructions don't work as written sometimes, and I have to 'feel around' the program to figure out what I'm supposed to do to get the expected result. I'm not sure if that's because I'm not understanding things clearly, or if I have a slightly different version of Flash. The book is for Flash MX 2004 and I have Flash MX 2004 professional. I don't know if that would make a difference. The book is a comprehensive introduction broken into manageable lessons. The kids find the exercises fairly manageable, but the lessons in between the exercises are written at a bit of a high reading level for them.

Kerman pretty much hit it on the head for me to get started authoring computer-based training in Flash. He explains things concisely and succinctly.

Pretty much a "to the point" kind of tutorial book. Although, it would have been nice to have a companion CD, Kerman has placed many of the excercises on a website for book owners. He has also been extremely accessible.

Useful book, but not ereror checked thoroughly and not consistent and clear in its presentation. Books dealing with action script and code must be concise and thoroughly tested. This book was not. Glad I didn't pay for it.

I was going through this book fairly well untilllllllllll.......... I came to the actionscripting chapters. Some work fine but I kept coming to exercises where I kept saying what the *#&^ am I doing wrong! I thought the big problem was I has flash mx instead of flash mx 2004, I guess I was wrong. As I read the other users reviews I discovered there are a lot of errors. I would have recommended this book but not anymore. Don't get this book unless you want to use it as a target from frustration.

Oh and you cannot get the downloads to work.

This is an excellent book for those who don't know much about Flash and even for those who are veterans. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to increase their Flash skills.

I really like this book because it builds on concepts by working through lessons and exercises. You actually create the Flash objects as you go along...there is also companion videos that reinforce the concepts at the end of most chapters, showing you the process again.

Nicely laid out and makes it easy to learn.

If you "learn by doing" this is a great book to get you there...

After completing most of the chapters I can say that the Hands on Training is really good. There were only one or two instances where the directions could have been written better, and even then I easily figured out what the author was talking about.

From this book I learned how to:
Draw shapes
Make a shape tween
Make a motion tween
Make an animated symbol
Use different aspects of the timeline
Change the document properties and publish my files to include in Dreamweaver
Draw using frame-by-frame animation
Use symbols and instances
and other things too small to mention

I'd also recommend the Dreamweaver 8 Hands on Training book, it's just as good.

I'm a beginner. I've been looking for a book about Flash that can give me a solid start and understanding of the program. This is the best book I've read about Flash so far.I've read about 7 on this topic but this one is the best. I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a good grasp on the program before moves on.

I'm always apprehensive about purchasing tech books so I normally go to the library and check them out for a few days before the purchase. With this book I didn't do that and I must say I am pleasantly surprised. The exercises are interesting and easy to follow. The tutorial CD is also quite good.

I just read two lessons, and between page 109-page 111, there are a few paragraphs on "Creating evenly spaced buttons for a web page". Every time I tried to drag the styles on to view inside ImageReady, the style is applied to the while view swallowing EVERY button in the view. I don't know whether the editors tested the instructions thoroughly.

This book was very useful to me! It takes you step by step with each lesson provided that explains everything, as if you were in a classroom. It doesn't take up much time, and its very easy to read and understand. If you are looking to learn photshop 5.5 from the VERY beginning, this is the book to start with!

This is THE book to learn Adobe Photoshop by. This book will not allow you to master the world's best, but most complicated graphic design program known to man, but you will have the best introduction to the program available. This book is so complete, yet simple to use, I can give it to my student's and say start here on page one and ask me if you have questions. They rarely have questions and when the are done they KNOW the program.

Don't expect to pass the ACE [Adobe Certified Expert] exam with this book alone, unless you are a seasoned Photoshop guru. I studied this book cover to cover and memorized all the lessons in the back of each chapter, and I only passed the ACE exam by a handful of questions [I got a 78%]. Don't get me wrong, this book is an OK addition to the library as a supplement to the Photoshop 5.5 manual, but it is not as effective at teaching the more useful techniques. I prefer the "Photoshop WOW! Book" style - densely packed with nothing but page after page of useful tips, tricks, how-to's, and techiniques of the masters. This is not that book.

This book provides a do-it-yourself training program for Adobe Photoshop. It provides step-by-step instructions that will help you explore and learn to use the main features of Photoshop. Each lesson begins with an overview of the skills you will learn, and an estimate of the time it will take to complete the lesson. Following that are the instructions that guide you towards completing the assigned tasks to the artwork contained on the accompanying CD-ROM. At the end of every chapter is a short list of review questions and answers.

I came to this book as a complete beginner- -the only graphics software I had used before was Microsoft Paint. I had an inkling that my supervisor would soon require me to begin using Photoshop, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to do so without training. I managed to get about a 2 month head start in using this book before I needed to use the software for work. Since I could manage to complete about a chapter a week in this book, that was barely enough to get by when the time came. With no background whatsoever in graphic arts, I had a tough time understanding the minimal explanations contained in this book of gradients, masks, and channels. The explanations of how to use these tools are very clear, but even after learning how to use them, I'm still quite hazy about what they are and why a designer would use them. For that reason, I wish this book had suggestions for further reading, to help graphic novices learn more about the general concepts behind the tools. Nevertheless, by carefully following the training program in this book, I was able to develop the skills necessary to do small photo editing tasks. More importantly, thanks to this book, I am now quite comfortable with the Photoshop interface and all its palettes, which seemed so formidable in the beginning.

Overall, the instructions and screen shots in the book were quite clear. Even though I was using the book for Photoshop version 5.5 with version 6.0 software, I was still able to follow along on almost every task (sometimes with the assistance of Photoshop Help, to find the new location of the required tools). The only major inaccuracy that I found was in the chapter 15 review questions, where the sequencing of questions and answers was completely disorganized.

This book has some great theory and topics that do not fade with time. Even though there is a Second Edition out the information within this book is still rich and plentiful. I own several of the [digital] titles and have been pleased with all of them, and this one is probably about the most informative of all the titles I own.

Mr Birn makes great effort to illuminate the subtle and unappreciated aspects of creating visually aesthetic lighting and rendering. He helps pin down the elusive "why" factor, as opposed to bombarding the reader with a lot of technical information.

A delightful book to have if you need to know about lighting and rendering.

This book goes way beyond what you need to know, in a good way. I have read and re-read this book numerous times, learning new things with each read. It is like taking 2 courses in lighting and 2 in color. Extremely professionally written from a practicing professional (Pixar Studios). Classic.

This 1st edition came out in 2000 and now there's a new 2nd edition coming out this year ~ I ordered the up~to~date one instead!

I like to just jump in. Hate reading instruction manuals, find most of them little better than the cause of a good nights sleep. This book is my first exception!
Sure I have still jumped in but have also worked my way through this book from the beginning and am finding the answers to my problems as I create them. Also finding that the book is interesting enough in itself, that I am avoiding creating problems. A first!
Will buy another of McFarlands books now, on CSS. His style is very readable and easy to follow.

I bought this book hoping it would be all that I would need to build my sites with cleanly and yet some complexity. I've found that I'm often at the library borrowing many other Dreamweaver 8 titles and finding them much more helpful. I've found finding specific help in this book a bit difficult, and the chapter progression doesn't really make sense. My main background is design and the arts - but I don't think this book is too technical for me... just counter-intuitive in its structure. I much prefer the Sitepoint books so far... even the Dreamweaver for Dummies are at least just as good, and much less expensive. Would not recommend to buy - maybe try it at your library first.

The title says it all. This is an must-have resource when learning Dreamweaver and the authors give you tips, shortcuts, as well as explanations for many of these tips and shortcuts which help you seriously cut through the clutter and get to the point, which is how to get your site up and running! I bought it along with Dreamweaver Hands On Training and I think it a great compliment.

For those who find it hard to follow on line help or tutorials, this is the book for you. The Missing Manual series is very instructive and helpful to those who are just beginning and to those who are well on their way to using Dreamweaver. Commands that you may have forgotten are easy to find in this book. I would recommend it.

I'll keep this short. Starting as a total novice in Dreamweaver this book has taught me pretty much everything I need to know. When ever I get stuck now I can get the answers that I need. Certainly blows the online help from Adobe out of the water. This is a must have book.

The book covers a lot of ground. I like the fact the the author starts with servlets rather than with JSP pages. This gives the reader a basis for anything else covered in the field of JSPs. Every single thing is supported by an example, which is very nice.
I would like however to warn JSP and Servlet newbies: the book assumes you know how to set up a servlet engine (Tomcat, Jboss, etc). The reason I say that is not because the book does not cover this topic, but because it is very obscure in the book. For example the author tells you that the way you access servlets is by typing you application directory + /servlets/ + the name of the servlet. He, for some reason, assumes that tomcat makes that url pattern the default for accesing servlets. It is not true. Tomcat leaves it up to you to decide hot to access your servlets. So you have to go and modify your web.xml file, which is not covered in the those set up sesctions of the book.
If you know how to set things up yourself, this book is invaluable.

It's a very useful book for Servlet,JSP starters with hands-on instructions to go about it. It's written in a nice, CONCISE manner covering many topics.

This book was a big help for me in passing IBM's exams that deal with the J2EE. Good breadth and depth in many of the categories on the exam and Marty puts things in a clear manner so you pick up the concepts quickly. Very well laid out.

I'd also mention this book is way more than just servlets/jsp's, it also has a ton of stuff on really understanding the deployment of J2EE webapps and how to really get the most out of your web.xml. It also has good coverage of j2ee security and JSTL. Hope this helps others decide.

I've been using the Marty Hall's saga (Core Web Programming, Core Servlets, More Servlets), for almost three years now, and I can recommend him as one of the best technical authors.

His treatment of Servlets and JSP is great, and I can only wait for his Struts book!

His examples are clear, concise and useful. Not the typical "Hello World", but real oriented-to-learning examples.

I searched at a great many titles including a couple of duds before I finally settled on Marty Hall's book. Perhaps it was the "More" part that made me wonder if I would be missing something....like this was part two.

As it turns out, that could not have been further from the truth and IMHO, although the titles is correct, it is a bit of a misnomer due to that misperception.

This really is the book you've been looking for if you want to learn JSP/Servlet programming, particularly with Tomcat (or ServletExec). Marty takes you through a full tour of JSP in case you are a beginner as I was, but he also ensures he tells you about many features of the spec/language to a level of completeness that far exceeds many other titles I looked at. He also explains how to get up and running with several servers (but especially with Tomcat) in a way that REALLY gets you up and running...almost every book had a Tomcat section, but this one really does describe usability approaches for your workflow. That, alone, is worth the price of the book, not to mention the many great other things you will learn along the way.

Furthermore, Marty is very approachable. I have e-mailed him on several occasions...one turned out to be an issue I misunderstood and another turned out to be an apparent change to the Tomcat default specs. But he typically responded to me within a matter of hours and got me up and running again on those few occasions where I became "stuck" (sure, I could have skipped the spot, but then I wouldn't UNDERSTAND it...he made sure I did understand it and replied with the WHY in each case).

You may still be wondering about that "more" part...on his website for the book, he makes the full older book available as a PDF...on occasion, he refers to it in the newer book for areas that can optionally go into further detail. This avoids repeatedness, but also gives you access to yet another excellent resource even if it is only partially out-of-date.

More Servlets, by contrast, is up-to-date as of the latest specifications (2.3/1.2) that have officially been released. Furthermore, he takes great care in pointing out items that are specific to the latest specification...he also points out items that are specific to certain browsers in those applicable instances.

This is definitely a book that teaches you JSP/Servlets, but it also teaches you approaches, workflow, and much much more.

There is a prerequisite that you need to know Java, and I readily agree with that statement...you do need to know Java (and for that, I strongly recommend HeadFirst Java by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates!!), but given even basic Java knowledge, you can be off and running with this book and I can tell you it is very difficult to put down once you've picked it up.

Ross Goldberg

Hi, everyone.

I bought this book. It's a huge disappointment for me. You beter buy the anzovin studio tutorial DVD's and look for a freeware JAVA applet called JLIPSYNC, use MIMIC or VOICE O MATIC This book makes it way to complicated.
Basicly all you have to do is analyse your vocal track roughly not word by word or letter by letter. That doesn't work. Try to analyse your track phonetical and see where THE LIPS AND THE MOUTH CHANGES. LESS IS MORE IN LIPSYNC. Add eyebrow wrinkles and nose up or down movements. Look at the pose your character is in. SEE THE LIPSYNC TOGETHER WITH THE POSE YOUR CHARACTER IS IN. That will work.
Reading this book won't.

I hate to say this, but didn't learn much more than which I had already been able to get from online tutorials and forums.

I am a 3d professional artist for a long time, I have to say I have read hundreds of books, watched hours of training videos, read pages of internet tutorials anything related to 3d animation. No other training material comes even close to things I have learned reading this book. It is a treasure that you have to keep somewhere close to your desk as a reference, whether you are modeling a character head, building blend shapes or rigging . I have used the techniques successfully in many projects. I thank Jason Osipa for writing this book and for teaching me how to build superior 3D characters. This is my second SS book, I also have the first edition. This 2nd edition is a lot different then the first.

Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done RightThis book is a very good resource for computer animators.

Have you ever worked with a facial rig that was based on a set of sliders in the viewport? Many of the most popular free rigs use that method these days. Well guess what -- it's sometimes called "the Osipa method," and it was popularized by the first edition of this book.

As a novice character rigger, this book opened my eyes to an entirely new way of looking at facial modeling, rigging, and animation. I can not recommend it highly enough. These days when I create a character, I always have two books within quick reach: The Art of Rigging (by CG Toolkit, only available from their website) and Stop Staring.

This book's ok overall. Though, the app itself is updated to a new version so often that I don't really think that buying the new version of the book every time is required. I'm using DW4.x now and I still refer to the 2.0 book for many of the features.

Its extremely rare when a product with such power can be put to use so quickly. The Dreamweaver 2 Bible gives and excellent introduction to all of Dreamweavers features, from the easiest to the more complicated. It accomplishes this while remaining easy to read and understand. Anyone who has worked with other web site creation tools knows that such an accomplishment is rare.

If your just getting started in web site creation or looking to get a better command of Dreamweavers more powerful abilities, feel confident that this book will get you going.

I've used this book extensivley as a guide when I couldln't figure out how to get something done. I think this is a great book for someone who needs that back-up.

I was thrown into handling our company's website after word got out that I had "web design experience". Laughable, considering I had only done a couple personal web pages that merely linked to other sites. After going through Dreamweaver's very brief manual, I realized that I needed something much more comprehensive. Armed with this book, determination, and a lot of experimenting, after two weeks I took over our web presence without too much difficulty. No mean feat considering we get several thousand hits per week.

Granted there are still chapters that I'm still working through after five months, but whether I'm learning something new or just re-visiting an old topic, this book has never let me down.

If you use Dreamweaver, you owe it to yourself to get this "must have".

Great, easy to read. Both for beginners and professionals.

The book successfully demonstrates practical use of frequently used tools in addition to showing how to approach projects. It is great for beginners trying to learn the nuances of Lightwave. Although Dan could have saved a lot of trees by omitting the first chapter, the rest of the book has proved useful in learning the program. I would recommend it to everyone starting from ground zero as I did.

This was another great resource for me, both as far as learning new things, as well as for quick references in times of need =)

The only thing is.. this book is huge....and I mean BIG and HEAVY. Not the book you would carry around in a backpack.

I have a very good job because of this book. Dan... You are the man.

I have spent a lot of money on 3d books in the past but this is the best by a distance, that I have bought. The head modeling tutorial in particular is just fantastic, I defy anyone to find a better modeling tutorial than this, its just brilliant. The really great thing is that the methods taught are easily transferable to other software packages and not just relevant to Lightwave. The only thing I would say is that if you are a beginner, prepare to work very hard, learning to make good 3d is tough, but if you are really prepared to do the hard work this book can take you a long way down the road. I would give it six out of five if I could !

This is probably the most comprehensive text I've used on LightWave. Very modeling intensive. It has rigging(bones)tutorials, but the "LW Applied 6.5/7" rigging tuorial is better. A must buy for the LW artist.

I'm on my third version of this book. It is comprehensive technical reference of core web technologies.

Specifically, HTML, Javascript, HTTP, CSS, and the like. As a reference, it is very thorough in each topic, covering every single element, every single object, every single response header, and every single style (at the time it was written, anyway). However, it is also very succinct. This book is NOT FOR LEARNING. It's a REFERENCE for professionals.

Of all the technical books I've ever owned, this book is without any doubt the one I use the most. This book (and even the third version) is a little out-of-date. Nonetheless, it is invaluable to a web developer, and is still better than any other reference that I'm aware of.

But I haven't found this book to be nearly as useful as I had hoped to after reading all these glowing reviews. My biggest problem with it is the lack of a simple Apache section governing all the real-world mods you might have to do on a regular basis. NOTHING in the book on, for instance, implementing SSL via .htaccess. In fact, it's because of the lack of treatment on SSL that I have to give this thing three stars. The CGI section is useful, the XML stuff is nice, the JavaScript reference is very valuable. But I have to say that without a comprehensive section on implementing SSL, this isn't a "real-world-ready" reference.

Perl in a Nutshell is quite complete. The 2nd addition covers CGI and Perl. This covers things that are specific to using perl on CGI. It is not a perl reference, it is a CGI reference.

This is not a tutorial for newbies but it is a fine book to get when you are a newbie. Obviously, since it is titled as a reference you will also want a book that is titled as a tutorial. (duh?)

I invested in a copy of the THIRD edition and am DELIGHTED. This reference does a good job of putting all the day-to-day needed information in one place. It saves me froming having to keep separate references on HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, CGI/Perl, HTTP, PHP, Apache functions, etc. right in my face.

I really applaud the compact and accessible way each chapter organizes and presents the details of syntax: they are clear yet take up much less space (1/5 the pages of books that are billed as references to each of the subjects included here) while giving you 95% of what a "comprehensive reference" might. I had been concerned that the information might be too compressed to be accessible, but in fact this volume is so much easier to scan through for an answer than many other reference styles. (Kudos to the book designers at O'Reilly!)

Although a reference work, it is not only a listing of syntax (as helpful as those lists are). The authors have compiled pretty readable and thorough mini-backgrounds and basic principles for each of the enormous realms that they document here. These are providing some reminders for me as I am ramp up my knowledgebase and skills; plus there are hints that I have not yet seen elsewhere in weightier tomes (e.g., on performance).

Readers may save themselves some money and desktop/bookshelf space + save some trees: this Nutshell is a vast storehouse that may enable you to forestall buying reference volumes for each of the topics covered here. Thanks to Spainhour & Eckstein for some careful work!

Note to aspiring (novice) webmasters: this IS a REFERENCE book. That is not a bad thing. You'll still appreciate having it by your side because you're regularly going to have basic questions about formating ("how do I say this in CSS instead of HTML?"). However, as one young reviewer below discovered, to BECOME a webmaster (or master) is going to require some "Quickstart" books, some instruction in DESIGN, and STRATEGY, etc. Bon voyage!

[ Further note from my earlier review: be sure you are NOT getting EARLIER edition. Complaints mentioned (below) in reviews of this book are rectified in the THIRD edition (ISBN 0596003579 ). It's probably a good idea to be watching as the reviews of that December 20002 volume to see how the work has changed.
In any event, with browsers and markup languages changing so fast almost everyone can be advised to jump to considering the most current edition -- even though (as of this writing) new copies of this 1999 second edition are still available. ]

The book includes reference on HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, HTTP, Apache modules and configuration, and web server performance. While all of the material is covered in O'Reilly's other books, I was impressed with the layout and presentation of this book. I also found that the reference material that is buried deep in O'Reilly's other books, was very easy to find in this one. I was especially impressed with the JavaScript and HTTP reference, and feel that these two sections will be used by the majority of this book's readers.