Desktop Books

As an instructor for universities and private institutions in Toronto, Canada, I review plenty of books, in hopes of finding reasonably-priced books that offer useful information for my students. This book by Ted Alspach is much cheaper than many other Acrobat 3 books, and the book's format makes it easy to find the information you need quickly and easily. There's not many books under $20 that are worth buying; I'm glad to say this is one of them!

Until I stumbled onto Acrobat 5 H O T (Hands On Training) I had thought the most helpful training books for the Adobe series were the Classroom In A Book series.

I found the authors Garrick Chow and Lynda Weinman to have found an excellent way to get the salient points succinctly put, particularly using the short movies to highlight certain features.

Although I remain a devotee of CIB methods, my library will include the HOT books for all complex software.

Until I purchased Acrobat 5 HOT I had no full appreciation for the capabilities and ease of use of Acrobat.

Chapters 8 through 11, Forms; Indexing and Searching; Document Security; and Creating an Interactive Multimedia Presentation, proved to be the most valuable chapters for me as I have started producing a newsletter for game and small livestock farming and intend to make it net-savvy. Without Acrobat the task would be impossible. Without this book, too daunting.

This book is a must for any one-person e-zine publisher.

This book is a thorough presentation on the subject of portable document formats or PDFs. PDFs, independent of platform and application, are a saving grace in the growing complexity of the computer world. Taz Tally's book addresses the variables involved in optimizing PDFs, starting from the creation of the original document all the way to the end product, the PDF. The book explains how to customize each file depending on its use. The author also covers manipulations of Acrobat Distiller and the versatile application Acrobat 6.

The book is well written and repetitive enough so if the reader missed the message on the first round, he or she will catch it again within just a few pages. The summaries, tables, and screen samples are particularly good and support the text. The author's style is as conversational as it gets within a technical book. I enjoyed his exclamations and honesty.

I am always interested in the completeness of the index since I often have the need to solve a specific problem. The sixteen-page index held enough detail to locate a reference in the book rather than having to search from page to page. The table of contents is also complete and easy-to-use.

This Sybex manual is an excellent resource for folks creating forms, presentations, and collaborative publications as well as learning about the more conventional conversion of digital documents to PDFs. This edition comes with a CD of material supporting the text including a demo of Sonar Bookends for automatic hyperlinking (to create a table of contents, an index, and more), FlightCheck, a prepress problem identifier, and a trial version of PitStop for visually checking and editing PDFs.

Dr. Tally is author of Avoiding the Scanning Blues, a guide to desktop scanning, and Electronic Publishing: Avoiding the Output Blues, a book on desktop publishing and Postscript files. Tally is also known for his entertaining seminars and instructional videos on a variety of computer topics.

This book is an exceptional example of the way Internet technical volumes should be written. As a director of e-Business at my firm I highly recommend this book to all of my practicioners. Superbly written with real world examples it is a must have for your technical library.

Makes finding information about some of Acrobat's more obscure capabilities quick and easy. Some examples: how to use the article tool, make sure your converted document displays bookmarks instead of just thumbnail views, and how to set security options. Although I work with Acrobat all the time I sometimes need a nudge to remember how to perform a task and this guide provides it. Another advantage is it is durable and compact. I recently moved to Acrobat 5.0 and still find this wonderful little card useful. You will really like this card if you, like myself, get frustrated with Acrobat's poorly designed help files. This card pinpoints a lot of information much faster than the Help function in either Acrobat 4 or 5.

I found this book so helpful as my reference guide. I knew a few things here or there with regards to Acrobat, but when I needed to do something new, I found the program less than intuitive, (even if you know other Adobe products like, Illustrator, or Photoshop etc.) that is where this great book came in! The way they put together quickstart books is exactly how it sounds. You can easily and quickly find step by step instructions on whatever you need to do. I keep it as a handy reference for projects that come my way where I need to use this program.

This book isn't for those just starting to work with the Adobe Creative Suite. But it is a great resource for people who work at design firms, ad agencies, and publishing houses where they work with multiple CS programs when creating designs. It addresses issues that arise everyday for the working designer or design student.

Excellent book!! I learned so much from this fun, easy-to-understand book. I had been working with adobe illustrator for a year and a half before I decided to get this book and take a course. Turns out there was so much more to adobe illustrator than I had realized. This book is beautifully written and I want to give the author a huge "Thank you" for writing such a great learning tool.

I've tried a few other tutorials but somehow none seem very comprehensive, just listing here's how to do this thing, here's how to do that thing. I liked this book because it started off with long exercises using the pen tool. I had to do some of them a couple of times and quickly got the hang of it! This was the first book that walked me through all of the basics in a methodical way. For that I am appreciative and am writing this review. I finally know Illustrator!

My recommendation after using the workbook is to practice, practice, practice...

This is a nice book, that has lots of pictures and anyone can learn illustrator in a day just by reading this book. It comes with a easy to disk with samples and hands-on activities.