Desktop Publishing Books

Not many editions of this book still available so this is a moot point, but save your money. Don't buy this book. Put the money in a fund to purchase better 3D software. I have abandoned Truespace entirely as I believed most serious 3D artists had. It's not the author's fault. It's just outdated software which might explain why no one has written a book about using it in over 4 years even though newer versions keep coming out. The book is ok but from it's description I though it might be more of a user's manual and I was dissapointed to see it wasn't.

Frank Rivera's Inside TrueSpace 4, is an excellent guide for both beginners and experienced users of TrueSpace 4. The book covers virtually all aspects of 3D modeling using TrueSpace including modeling using NURBS, spline modeling, metaballs, creating human and non human characters, shaders, including texture and bump mapping, alpha channel transparencies, animation, lighting, radiosity, volumetrics.

He even includes his own recommendations for those contemplating starting a career in this field.

His book is divided into categories and is well organized and is like an owner's manual. But unlike the TrueSpace owner's manual, this book is a how to book. The manual for the most part only explains the features and tools in the software and has only limited tutorials and explanations and a few examples. Mr. Rivera, and his colleagues in some chapters, actually explain step by step how to do various tasks in TrueSpace. In his book he details in practical step by step guides for example, how to build a star fighter using metaballs, how to create a fish, how to create twisted rope using the sweeping tools, how to create a human superhero using metaballs, how to create a mushroom using deformed spheres, and human figures with deformed spheres and cylinders. He gives practical examples as to how to animate some of these. He explains "bones" in detail and the keyframe editor, spline path animation. He explains in detail how all the tools work in practical very simple English instead of technicalese which some books write their manuals in. Lighting, radiosity, hard and soft shadows are covered in detail as well as dealing with rendering artifacts, light leaks and other issues. He gives tips of how to achieve photorealism even using this relatively old and obsolete piece of software. He even explains how he built the Native American chief on the cover!

It is amazing what can be done with this old software!

The book is an excellent companion to the owner's manaual, and in fact, when I am stuck on a problem, I often turn to Mr. Rivera's book first before going to the manual, partly because my manual is in PDF format on my computer and I like looking through a hard copy book better, but also because, Mr. Rivera explains things so well and with clarity and often gives those insider hints and tips, which may not be mentioned in the manual. He apparently has been doing this a while and he knows what he is talking about.

Great book!

The only criticism that I have is that he doesn't cover plastiforming in TrueSpace, a tool that, as far as I know, is unique to TrueSpace. Maybe Bryce or some landscape modeling software have something like it. But I have 3 different 3D modelers and haven't seen anybody else with anything like it -- not even close.

That would be a cool tool to work with and cover in a tutorial.

This book was published four years ago and still is by far the most comprehensive tome on TS available in the market. A combo with truSpace FX Creations ought to make it a more useful source of advice and information.

Programmers who want to write their own game programs are often stuck developing their own graphics as well. TrueSpace4 allows you to produce complex 3D mesh objects to be loaded directly into DirectX game applications. I am by no means an artist but I was very pleasently surprised with the great job Frank Rivera does at giving the reader clear and easy to follow tutorials allowing even non-pro artists to produce fantastic results. I highly recommend this book to game programmers and computer artists alike.

And I have. Frank used to run a tutorials site which contained a large portion of the content of this book FOR FREE. Many of the techniques for character modeling were outdated years before this book was even published. The section on special effects using spheres is especially disheartening, since trueSpace has had many plugins available for some time that were created for particle effects and other special effects. This is a decent book for a beginner, but to REALLY get to know the program, and if you can get a hold of it, pick up Peter Plantecs' trueSpace2 Bible. Since most of the features in trueSpace2 are in trueSpace 4, you can get that book cheaper and it's written MUCH better, and many of the tutorials in Inside trueSpace4 were written FOR trueSpace 2, you'd be better off

I bought this book hoping to learn more about After Effects but unfortunately, the only good tutorial that really teaches you about the program is the Atomic Cafe because it goes over importing Layered Photoshop Documents, Illustrator files, and Quicktime movies. All the other lessons in the book are a huge disappointment. I don't like saying that because I think Alex Lindsay does an admirable job with going into great detail about Multi-Pass rendering techniques. Check out his tutorials and teachings at Pixel Corps or DV Garage. You won't find much detail here. That is not to say that the book is not without its merits; I love how the Atomic Cafe lessons teaches the fundamentals and techniques of nested compositions, as well as complex effects. If you really want some good After Effects tutorial lessons, then check out Trish and Chris's other books which do a little better at giving you the information.

i needed this book for school, and it did the job i learned tons of effect tricks through this book.

if motion graphics is your thing, this is a fantastic resource. Nobody more clearly explains the basic concepts of layering, nesting, timelines, footage, transformations, masks, precomposing, stencils, track mattes, transfer modes, keyframes, rendering, resolutions, plugins, working with audio, and much more.

The "Creating Motion Graphics with AE", and "After Effects in Production" must be considered the best of the best, even for those who may be using other products such as Apple Motion, or Combustion, etc.

Highly recommended, as is having plenty of time and some decent hardware.
The tutorials are a blast ! Go thru them all (this takes awhile folks) and you begin to get the idea....motion graphics is fun !!!

After I bought after effects the software had little interest for me. I never new that broadcasting and such could be such fun. Did a lot of editing for animation studies with this tool. Looking forward to buy the next book when I'm finish with this. Recommended for advance users.

This is an excellent resource for After Effects. The "Meyers" Have always produced great learning materials and this is another proof positive of that.

I attempted to learn Flash 5 first with a dummies book and then a sam's book. Neither compared to this one. The whole hands-on-training series offers just that, a hands-on approach to development. The included tutorial movies were especially useful and were the individual exercises the author had us follow along with. It doesn't cover many advanced topics, like action scripting, but for a beginner just wanting to learn flash, this is a good read.

The book gives clear step-by step instructions on most Flash 5 functions.

However, the book does not give clear instructions on how to create navigation buttons. I had to spend hours of trial and error.

Nor does the book explain how to make input boxes and provide feedback for an educational program. I am having to purchase a few more Flash 5 manuals and hope that at least one of those manuals will help me.

I've gone through a variety of tutorials, but this one I highly recommend. The lessons are easy and straightforward. People have told me Flash 5 was hard to learn, but with this book I thought otherwise.

This book was written by teachers for learning,and it does it better than any other books I've seen. It doesn't hurt that she really knows her Flash as well.

Some will bypass the book because it isn't a top notch reference guide for the experienced person. My view is "What good is a reference manual if you don't have a good book to teach you?"

You won't do better than this book for learning Flash.

I've tried 3 or 4 other books while trying to learn Flash over the last two years. This is the one that finally got me way up the learning curve.

Overpriced? No, I don't think so. The authors and editors put in a helluva lot of work on this book, breaking the subject matter into digestible lessons and then double-checking the tutorials. I've paid as much for other books that taught me nothing (because they weren't user-friendly and didn't keep my interest) and paid six times as much for one-day courses that were excellent but 50% forgotten a week later.

I see some of the other reviewers complain that the book does a little too much hand-holding and baby-talking. Well, if you haven't got much going on in your life, then I suppose you can teach yourself Flash by trial-and-error and by trying to read the inscrutable Macromedia manuals. The rest of us, with real lives, really need and appreciate the baby-step tutorials and extras on the CD.

The authors are teachers and seem to be warm human beings as well. I would not only recommend this book, I'd look forward to taking real, live classes from them.

I have had limited experience creating web pages. Learning Web Design has made the task so much easier. This book is very clearly written with great examples. I would highly recommend if you are just starting out or looking for a text to use in the classroom.

This is an excellent book if you are a novice looking to learn HTML and CSS.
The book is easy to read and follow, and includes a companion website which has downloadable code examples with which you can practice.
I purchased this book with the intention of using it as an easy CSS reference, but ended up learning some excellent HTML skills, as well.

This is, by far, the most useful and easy-to-read book on web design that I have seen / purchased so far.

I am a programmer by trade, but find it useful to be aware of, if not proficient in, web technologies. I purchased this book because I have been dabbling in web design for a long time now, but never as a primary task. This book is useful as a review of the current web standards and techniques, as well as an introduction for individuals who may be new to the topics discussed therein. The chapters are succinct, providing the reader all the necessary information to become informed without wasting time on details that may be distracting for review or overwhelming for beginners. I highly recommend this book.

This book is a great beginning guide to web design. The book does not overload you and sticks with the basics, but offers you other resources to dive deeper into various topics.

This book also gives you great examples to follow and exercises to do on your own. I found that doing the exercises helped me gain a better understanding of the various web design techniques.

This book has given me a huge head start with xhtml, css, and web graphics. I started with zero understanding of web design and now I have the tools to make a good looking functional website.

I rate this book with 5 stars for being a solid introduction to (X)HTML and CSS and for being clear, easy to follow, and colourful.

I disagree with the previous reviewer BB, who said the book was not for beginners and rated it with one star. He mentions Jennifer N. Robbins uses vocabulary she hasn't defined before. Well, if he's talking about terms like web browser, web server, or link, I might agree with him/her, but hey, those words are common vocabulary words for any Internet user. Perhaps if he had pointed out specific words, I might have said a bit more on his review.

Let me convince you: I'm not a native English speaker and I got the information perfectly well.

It is a shame this book has fallen into 4.5 stars just because of one 1 star rating review informing about problematic issues with no sort of justification or examples proving what the reviewer is complaining about.

In any case, we have to respect his/her opinion, though I didn't take his comments or rating into account when deciding whether to buy the book or not; the book turned out just fine, as I had expected based on the other reviews.

Jennifer Robins has done a great job introducing the reader to virtually all html elements (I guess all, but a professional might notice a few of them are missing).

The contents are colourful as hell, well organised, and they follow a static format scheme that allows for easy readability; the author uses sidebars every now and then to point out key information; the book shows she has a clear mind on how to get a beginner to digest the information presented.

I think the technique she used to introduce us to the different aspects of html/css is just the more appropiate for a starter book. She goes over every aspect, then she writes a sample code about that specific one, and then she shows the resulting page. Once again, she'll colour-code the html code, and then either encase the result in a box, or take a screenshot.

Where I want to get to here is, you aren't going to find a ten pages long html code combining every single element she's gone over and beating the crap out of everyone who tries to read it and point out each section in the resulting html page.

That being said, and bearing in mind the other reviews, I guess nothing else can be said about this great piece of work.

I enjoyed reading the book and use it extensively.
I thought the book could have had less "corn" dialogue.
The book did not address how to remove flash reflections off of eye glasses.

Excellent layout and easy to read.
Kelby has a great instructional, yet whimsical style.
Very good for the layman; would be digital photo manipulator.
The only demerit I would note is the lack of more indepth instructions for uses of "layers".
Layers are my weakest area for this software, but the rest of the info was great and very useful with great illustrations.

I have the same review title for all Scott's books. I did a panorama in 5 minutes...what more can I say? Dont think - Scott's books are awesome.

This book is so helpful that I also keep a handwritten tip sheet for portability in addition to having the book by my computer. I use post-it notes with written tabs to access often-used techniques. Great exercises and tips!

Excellent workbook to learn how to use a great photo editing program. The photographs used in the book can be downloaded from Scott Kelby's web site and you can perform photo editing just like in the book. Our club has made a series of workshops out of this book to improve the skills of members and the book is recommended for everyone.

Fantastic, really simple tutorials and suggested websites for further info. Deals with the basics to get an extemely powerful website online.

There are many more aspects to web design but anyone from the total beginner to intermediate should find this book helpful.

Better than Dreamweaver MX 2004 "Training From the Source". This is a step by step book for beginners thru experts. I found it easy to follow and understand. It is also a good reference book for the experienced, which I am not. Why Macromedia could not furnish a book like this with there software I will never understand. The same goes for the new Dreamweaver 8. They want you to buy there product but not show you how to use it. This is a good buy.

So many software books are so confusing and difficult to understand, I really appreciateone that is clear and truly helpful, which this one is.

I have read this book cover to cover. You can read it in front of your computer and perform the tutorials or you can simple read an look at the illustrations. Both provide you with a very accurate experience. The online web site allows you to download all of the necessary files to perform your labs if you desire. It is simple, elegant, and well thought out book. You can't walk away from this book and not say that you did not truely learn to use Dreamweaver MX 2004. I struggled to learn this program, after reading the book, I have built several complex websites, complete with dynamic database integration. This book is that good!

I admit I'm biased because I've had Dave as a teacher and he's a great one, but his book is like his teaching -- clear, comprehensible, practical and most importantly, funny. Who wouldn't want to work on the National Exasperator pages? His tutorials are excellent, easy to use and fun.

I have been using this book a lot, in the recent months, and I am finding it very useful. I am not *at all* an expert latex user, but I do have decent programming skills, and I usually use a computer for hours every day, so my IT skills are decent, overall. For writing technical documents I have been using for years a fairly dated version of ScientificWorkplace, but I am now slowly switching to do more and more in latex, which gives me greater flexibility. What I usually do now is writing my documents in ScientificWorkplace, and then taking care of formatting and other unusual features editing the documents in Latex, through a program called WinEdt. In almost all cases, when I am in trouble with some commands or options, I find a clear solution in this book. For this reason, if your profile sounds a bit like mine, I would highly recommend this book.

This is an updated tutorial and also a very good reference manual.
I have the full set of official LaTeX books
(the Lamport's manual, The LaTeX Companion, The LaTeX Graphics Companion,
and The LaTeX Web Companion),
and also this Kopka-Daly book, and the Hoenig book.
The official LaTeX 'basic' books (the Lamport's manual and the LaTeX
Companion) are a bit outdated, so this is the book to buy now.
If you are a beginner, this is the book for you, because it covers
from the basics to advanced topics.
If you are not a beginner, you will benefit from it, because it's updated,
it's a good trade-off between a too simple basic manual and an advanced one,
and because it has very useful parts, like Error Messages, Programming,
and a very good and unique Command Summary chapter that is truly special.

A superb book: everything you really need to know about LaTeX, impeccably organized and clearly expressed. A pleasure to read and to use.

Any book that claims to cater for beginners and advanced users alike has quite a task ahead of it and I don't believe this guide to LaTeX does justice to either category of user.

The true nature of this 616 page beast is spelt out in chapter 1, where the reader is advised that the book "is designed for LaTeX users who have little or no experience with computers" and that there exists "considerable repetition in the text". Unless you have a solid week to spare and the memory of a gold fish this book has the potential to be incredibly frustrating. Instead of being immersed in worthwhile examples demonstrating the true power of LaTeX, the reader is forced to trawl through paragraph after paragraph of verbose explanation. Worse still, with minimal imagination employed in presentation, the fact that this book was typeset using LaTeX doesn't inspire confidence - helpful hints supposedly written in a smaller typeface to make them distinct, simply disappear into the sea of sentences.

There are many LaTeX references out there to chose from, but inevitably all books in the market place must be compared with texts by Goossens et al (400 pages, published 1994) and LaTeX developer Lamport (272 pages, published 1994). Other reviewers have correctly pointed out that this book covers more than others combined. The plethora of appendices is dense but in some cases not as useful as would first appear. For instance, one table included contains a complete list of possible PostScript fonts, great you say, until you notice that they're all displayed in the same font! However, combining this unrivalled brevity with the fact that LaTeX is updated on an annual basis and it's not hard to see why you might opt for a book published in 1999, which is larger and relatively priced to both alternative books published in 1994.

With a LaTeX 3 version in the pipeline and with the internet offering a number of compact LaTeX HOWTO's and quick references (most notably "The Not-So-Short Guide to LaTeX"), a wise alternative might be to arm yourself with a downloaded guide and actually learn through trying (inevitably making your fair share of mistakes along the way) and to hold off to see what the next generation of published LaTeX references have to offer.

You can't expect anything more from a book on this subject. It is suitable for a beginner that doesn't know a thing about LaTeX, but also includes details on important advanced features like BibTeX and makeindex. Perhaps most importantly in the long run, the excellent index and detailed appendices make this a valuable reference. I use LaTeX all the time and this book is never far from my side!

Maybe I'm strange since most people seem to love this book, but I find it to be not that helpful. The author does seem to know what she's talking about, but I don't like the overall arrangement of the book. For one thing, instead of having a 1-2-3 list for how to do something like the Visual Quickstart guides have, this book has a rather wordy explanation for each procedure. To make matters worse, almost everything has tutorials mixed in with it, so if you just want to see how to do something, you have to also wade through all that tutorial information, which gets to be very frustrating. I can't much assess the tutorials, since I didn't try many of them, but perhaps the book would be simpler to follow with a 1-2-3 explanation of a procedure, then a tutorial about it AFTER that so you don't have to wade through both if you don't need to. Another carp is that the Contents page only gives a page number for the beginning of a chapter, and not for anything within the chapter, so you have to go to the beginning of a chapter and start flipping pages until you come to what you want. And is the Index comprehensive? For instance, I never could find anything on how to align more than one element simultaneously on a layered page, and had problems finding other things too. I finally just gave up on all this and ordered another book on Dreamweaver. Thus, I conclude that MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER MX 2004 by Page is OK and will eventually teach you Dreamweaver, but is certainly not very easy to use.

This is a pretty good tutorial on using Dreamweaver. The different chapters illuminate various ways of building and organizing your pages. After following the lessons, you can see which method will work for you depending on your desired results and the complexity of your site. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to learn how to use Dreamweaver.

This book was used as a textbook for an IVTech class. It was extremely helpful for an initial exposure to web page development. The chapters are based on the tutorial on the included CD. The bold items in the text allow you to skim through assignments quickly. There is also quite a bit of very helpful detail and background information included.
This book is very good to "handhold" a reader through a totally new topic, yet it also provides enough detail to show the reader how to develop quality web pages.
The one topic that was not covered was how to access a database, although this is covered in a tutorial in the Dreamweaver software.

I got this on a recommendation from a seminar. It is the best Dreamweaver source I have found.

Chapters are well organized and I am learning new techniques
with each lesson.

This book is okay if you are trying to learn something on your own and need step by step instructions. By no means is this a reference book for dreamweaver or xhtml.

I dont have anything bad to say about the book, but theres nothing unique or intuitive about it either.

the final textures are excellent. the only problem is sometimes the insructions are a little vague and the software in the book is outdated

There's a lot to like about a book like this for the beginning texture artist, such as myself. It gives you the fundamentals of how to recreate a texture from the ground up without actually having to paint hardly anything! Just use what Photoshop has to offer and you can follow this book all the way through.
That would be the downside though, must have Photoshop! If you don't then I wouldn't see you getting much out of this book except the techniques, which may or may not be done in another paint program.
This is just a beginner's book because it doesn't cover anything about skin or human painting and texturing, which is what I'm now looking for in another book. This just covers inanimate objects, but it just blows my mind how easy it now is using his techniques. I'm no longer intimidated by a blank white screen with no textures, and am now cranking stuff out a lot better looking (not professional yet, but getting there).
Deffinantly worth getting for beginners or people apprehensive towards texturing.

This book is useful as a jumping-off point for using Photoshop to create textures, and covers most of the basic topics that someone new to both Photoshop and texturing would need to know. However, you'll need to search for additional resources to complete the journey that this book starts you on, since it's a pretty basic overview with a few confidence-building exercises that give you a taste of the possibilities.

I already know texturing and wanted to take my texturing to the next level. I compared textures before and after, and I noticed a difference. Its easier to make hand painted textures for me now.
There are step by step examples of how to make bricks, windows, doors, etc.
It even discusses how to take pictures of textures yourself, and how to make your 3d scenes seem more real by placing objects, breaking up plain parts, etc.
The only thing missing is how to create history on textures and as far as I can tell, there are no books.
I recommend going to cgsociety and check out the forums. Stephen Morrell has a good pdf on texturing somewhere.

Unlike the rewiever who gave this book 1 star, I am giving 5. Because unlike him, I find this full-color book very well written and very useful. It goes beyond basic texture creation tutorials. The first half of the book explains theory behind good textures and texture creation as well as ways to take pictures for your own textures. It gives lot of examples to demonstrate various points. The second half of the book is the tutorial part. The tutorials are detailed and easy to follow. The only negative thing I find about this book is, that the tutorials give you exact values for everything without explaining why these values were actually chosen. However, it is up to the user to make his/her own tweeking and see, how changing these values effect the final result. Also, I would like to see how these textures are applied to a specific UV layout, which the book does not discuss. But then again, the book is about creating textures, not applying them to your model, so I do not hold it against it. After all, the textures that are created in the tutorials are nicely done and you certainly can find a good use for any of them. So, five stars it is.

The book was a very simple read. Good online examples, but I was looking for something a little deeper.

Gary Rosenzweig's _ActionScript for Fun and Games_ is hands down the most clear, concise, easy to understand, and well written programming book I have ever read. I can not recommend it highly enough. Rosenzweig's style takes the best aspects of the "Dummies" books (clarity and humor) and combines it with the level of depth and detail you expect from a reference book. For the first time programmer, he breaks down every line of code into its component parts and explains what each part does and why. For the more advanced programmer, his layout and organization allows you to go to exactly the section you need without skimming through introductory material first. Whether you are totally new to ActionScript or an advanced Flash programmer, this book belongs on your shelf.

I bought this book after flash mx was released, so I spent a great deal of time rewriting the code from this book to be more "mx-like". Such as having the code more centralized and creating clips instead of duplicating. If you stick to the flash 5 ways of doing things, this is a great book...however, some of the techniques in this book are now considered bad technique with MX. As far as gaming goes, this book is really good. Just wish I waited on the mx version!

Having mastered flash basics - this was the first Actionscript book I bought. It's nice to get straight into making cool programmes instead of having to master hundreds of commands first. Gary explains actionscript in a really easy to understand way and you end up with some really good programmes that you will probably use again and again. 5 days later I'm churning out work like I've been using Flash all my life. Thanks Gary!

This book is certainly the most fun way to learn ActionScript ! The examples are great and FUN ! Even if you're not interested in games, I would recommend this for beginners wanting to work with ActionScript. I also bought Moock's book, which was a quite boring read and is only useful as a reference. This book is the kind that you go through from cover to cover (you can't put it down until you finish it !)