Game Design Books

This book had the most in-depth reference for output, which is the information I was looking for. Other books that are in the market are gear toward chapter by chapter 'training', and does not cover this information extensively like the Bible does. The Bible explains print output for your printer as well as for commercial printing, basic and advance output set up with explanation of what each set up do and what to do to get the results you want. This is a great reference for design/print professionals who are new to the field as well as experts.

With no exception this book is other great and complete InDesign (CS3) reference from Galen Gruman and Wiley Publishing.

For whom is this book? Really, for very wide auditory of InDesign users. I can recommend this books to people who consider themselves as beginners or advanced users of this program. This books will be also helpful to any designer making the switch from QuarkXpress to InDesign. Using the side-by-side comparison of features is much faster than trying to find the answers online, because in order to look up how to do something, you have to know what it's called in InDesign. With this book, you don't.

In fact, Bibles are the most convenient form of explaining of what software does that I've ever seen.
You have all information under your hand in any time of night and day. And users of Microsoft Vista will be very exited as book stays up-to-date. Book is written as for Windows users, as for Macintosh ones.

This Bible will sit next to you all day long. You can read it front to back and use it as a reference during your projects. And this book is worth it if you have or plan to purchase CS3, upgrade to CS3 or want to know more about InDesign CS3.

This book represents an excellent value. You will find anything you wanna in this book: starting from creating frames and using tables, applying color, special effects, working with images, master pages, using grids, and guides, shapes up to small color management course and output fundamentals.

If you just started with InDesign, most likely you not familiar with such terms as "leading", "kerning", "bleeds", "slugs" or other typographical terms mean, but you won't be lost in the jargon any longer. This book will bring you on right level with fine explanations.

End of the book represents summary of what we found out in whole book. Or from other hand maybe it's exactly the place to start read this book for people who just switched from QuarkXPress or PageMaker to InDesign. You can also in once to remember the most usable short cuts that will save you a plenty of time in future (in real there is 10 pages of short cuts but just start from couple and in time you will remember them all).

The most easy way to study yourself smth - just to start. Make some fake project for yourself and how to make it - this book will tell you. And i'm sure that after a couple of projects you will feel yourself almost a pro in InDesign CS3 (previous and versions that will follow, because main part of using program you will already know as 2x2).

I advice you also to pay attention to end of book to chapter number VIII and IX. If you familiar a bit with programming you will see the true value in chapter number X.

So, if you searching for good InDesign CS3 reference, put your finger on this Bible.


P.S. - If you just came from QuarkXpress, i would also recommend you other book of Galen Gruman "QuarkXPress to InDesign: Face to Face"

Over 900 utterly boring pages. I skimmed the first 150 pages and had to come to the conclusion that you cannot rely on the accuracy of this book. The author lists menus such as "File > Open..." and "explains" that ' "File > Open..." opens files.'. Wow, that was really the holy grail. The ultimate conclusion.

And "File > Print" prints a document... yeah. Sure. I wouldn't know otherwise. The options are listed, but not explained. Unless you are blind, you can see the options you have. I want a book which tells me what these options do, not how many they are. I don't need this kind of "help".

In a nutshell, this book is boring as boring can be. Wasted money. My advice: put your money elsewhere.

I knew very little about Indesign CS3 when I purchased this book. Easy to read, extremely well-organized and cross-referenced, this in-depth book gave me everything I need to take a document from "File-Open" to Printing production. The author writes in a clear and, surprisingly, engaging style (because long books about computer programs often work better than Narcotics to help you fall asleep). I learned priceless secrets as well as indispensable basics - I will read it again and again to pick up on more and more good, solid material that will continue to help me grow as a desktop publisher. I recommend this book without reservation!

This book has been a pretty good help to me. It helped me learn the program even before I got a copy of it. It is set up for just about any level of experience with the program and is organized into labeled chapters so you can skip any content that you already know or will never use (which may happen a lot if you are not a completely serious publisher). But I think this is a good help for me and I plan to keep it and use for future references with the program.

This books really make learning Flash EASY!! If you are new to Flash and you want to start making movies right away, you have to get this book!!!

This book is very big on details and I feel I'm learning more about Flash than other books I've used.

This book is a descent resource of basic information; that is, if you can find it. That's the most frustrating thing about this book is that it suffers from poor organization and a horrible index that follows it's own inexplicable logic.

E-mail links? No listing in the index. Same for such basic terms as: pop-up windows, navigation, browser windows, publishing, windows, importing, and printing. It was easier and less frustrating to flip through the entire book than to try to figure out the logic of the index.

If you chance on some information that you may need, put a placeholder or a stickynote there immediately; you may never find it again.

This 'Visual Quickstart guide' by Katherine Ulrich is really useless and was obviously written for beginners. If you have programming experience and are looking into using flash, I highly recommend that you DO NOT buy this book. The whole books basically teaches motion tweening and using basic drawing tools. It doesnt teach the power of flash or even teach you how to use the built in flash components either. If you want to learn how to make a cat dancing from one side of the stage to the other, than this book is great. If you want to learn how to build rich flash programs, then buy something else. Lets just put it this way: Chapter 14, page 533 finally introduces importing graphics and chapter 13 talks about Authoring Utilities.

I would give this book MINUS 5 stars if I could. Look, if you're writing a book about any sort of computer code (unforgiving stuff that doesn't work right if you get a character wrong), I think you have a responsibility to proofread the *@#*! thing. This book doesn't appear to have been proofread or had a technical editor give it more than a cursory glance. It's full of errors that will stop you cold. I've spent countless hours going over the same pages over and over again, trying to guess where the author's mistakes are. What a waste of time. Also, the instructions are written in incredibly unprecise language (terms like "frame", "keyframe" and "blank keyframe" are often used interchangeably - hey, brilliant writer, it makes a difference!), requiring you to guess what the writer really means.

Oh, they also lie: the book claims to have a supporting website with artwork files you can download, yet none exists - go look, there is none (I really could care less about downloading the files, but I was hoping to find a list of corrections for the many errors in the text - and found no ebsite where they claim one exists). I think this is just plain dishonest. Shame on them.

There's no way to contact the author to clarify/correct her errors, either (maybe she didn't want to get reamed by angry people who bought the book sending her email?).

Yeah, I'm mad I wasted 25 bucks on this piece of junk. I recommend you don't make the same mistake I did - instead I suggest you buy a book that the author actually proofread - 'cause this one clearly didn't bother with such trivial matters as getting details right.

This is a really terrible, terrible book, completely irresponsible. It would be a wonderful way to waste many, many hours of your time.
Feh!

I have been creating French Beaded work for 4 years. This was my first book. It is true that there aren't a lot of projects layed out, but basic technique is thoroughly explained and illustrated which is an excellent place to begin. With the basic technique taught in this book it is quite easy to move forward into floral self expression. Advanced techniques may be found in other books and a number of project books are available on the market, but I have always held this first book in high regard for helping me master the fundamentals. Pictures of contemporary as well as vintage work provide inspiration. I feel that the combination of good sound basic technique and inspiring photos is a great launching pad for supporting a newbie to explore creating French beaded florals.

The instructions are sketchy. You can't really MAKE anything with this book...no projects...but the pictures of the finished pieces are pretty. I'd definitely go with a Dalene Kelly book before this one.

Well I have looked into different books on beaded flowers and saw reviews of this book so I went to my local library and requested it. Well when I got it I sat and looked through it while I did like how the instructions were simple and clear I did find it was lacking in projects I got a few of the other books out there and feel they are much better. I did love the galeray of flowers in the middle of the book and would have rather had the patterns for some of those flowers instead. I will say if you really want this book find it at the library and copy the first few pages in techniques and return it. Don't buy it.

Arlene Baker has obviously been hitting eBay pretty hard, because this book seems to show the fruits of auctions won. It is at best a collection of photos of vintage French Beaded Flowers. She gives mediocre directions for learning the basic techniques and throws in a few patterns for making trite blossoms into brooches.



But this book doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: basic guide, jewelry pattern book or Coffee Table Book? And It fails at all three. Better guides are available with the dover reprints (check out the Nathanson books.) Actually, any other beaded flower book seems to cover the basics better. There are Jewelry patterns out there for French Beaded Flowers, and anyone can take a pattern for a single bloom from any book and attach the flower to a barrette. Granted, had Baker given good clear directions on how to do this, I would give her credit for that. But alas, she fails to do so. And as a Coffee Table Book, well the photography is unremarkable, some of the actual flowers are pretty, especially the ones made by her friends who seem to be accomplished artists. But the majority of this book is a "show off". It is used to document a personal collection of vintage flowers. Great for insurance documentation. Unfortunately, there are no museum pieces here, no spectacular work. Nothing you can't find on eBay, that is if Arlene doesn't get to it first.

I am serious, if you want to look at pretty pictures of French Beaded Flowers, do a Google search.

I thought that the structure of the book was very unbalanced. The instructions are nice, but they are all in the front part of the book, and are hand-drawn. Color photos of finished projects are in the second part of the book. I prefer a book that has step-by-step instructions included with each project. Also, not very many projects are included. I hate to say it, but I've seen better books on french beaded flowers. To be fair, there are some very nice arrangement that provide inspiration.

Nice to look through, but I wouldn't recommend buying it to keep.

This book covers the basic but it lacks more advanced material. The tutorials give you a good idea on how to get things done.

One thing that bothered me were the numerous grammatical errors that really made understanding tough. Sometimes you have to reread and figure out what the author meant, not what he wrote.

(I've given up on Carrara 5 due to many bugs and frustrations. I have yet to try 6.)

Very good book to speed the learning curve of Carrera 6 but you still got to read the manual, you get to make a rocket, a human body, a plane, then you got two chapter of Hexagon that is another software by Daz3D, you got a demo of Hexagon on the cd if you wanna try it, then texture and animation in Carrera all the exercises come on the cd, pretty good book for beginners.

Carrara, like Poser, has changed hands over the years. A few years ago, DAZ3D bought Carrara 5.

Carrara is handicapped by that change of ownership. Many previous Carrara users resent DAZ for buying the product. They say DAZ's emphasis on Poser content (and naked women) cheapens Carrara's image.

Many people are also resentful because they lost their jobs when the sale was made. From what I understand, the previous company was having financial problems. DAZ, in effect rescued the program, and kept some of the programmers when the sale was made.

What is the relevance of this information? These circumstances make it almost impossible for me, and others to learn the program.

You can't go to the forums hosted by previous fans of Carrara. They're still angry at DAZ.. and they've changed the focus of their site.

The DAZ forums, unfortunately, suffer from the negative influence of various people who've been getting away with their tactics for several years. They've succeeded in driving away many good people over the years.

DAZ has yet to make a decent manual for any of their software.. Usually you're lucky if you can get an outdated Adobe Acrobat file. All too many people think that video tutorials are the way to go. I just can't learn from videos.

Apparently they don't make a new Carrara book for each version.. They skip versions... I bought the Carrara 5 book in an attempt to learn Carrara 6. That's a bad idea.

DAZ is now involved in some sort of circular disaster. They've setup Carrara to work with Poser and DAZ|Studio. But they keep changing DAZ|Studio and breaking that connection somehow.

The result is that I don't use Carrara, and this book.

I didn't want to use another 3d program as Carrara but I need it to build airplanes from drawn plans. This book gave me the possibility to understand how doing it! I have search around the web for tutorials on modelling airplanes or human figures But i never found something exaustive! This is a great book the only thing you need is to calm down your adventure spirit and follow step by step the author because sometimes result hard to understand even for novice like me.
A must have however !

This book covers a lot of modelling concepts for the beginner, and walks a person through the steps needed to model in a variety of ways (spline and vertex), and even has a chapter on modelling with Hexagon. Furthermore, the book briefly mentions the pro's and con's of UV, procedural, and projection mapping. Its tutorials are good for getting your feet wet, and a pretty thorough introduction to Carrara.
It may be missing some new Pro 5 features, so it might not be ideal for the seasoned Carrara veteran, however for beginners and intermediate people, its a fantastic resource.

I initially let some of the negative reviews persuade me from not buying the book, however with so few printed resources, I decided to get it. It was well worth the money spent, and I'm very glad I did buy it.

I really do not understand what the negative reviews are all about for this book. Even if you do not want to use office to generate your xml, you can still read over those chapters use the xml file created and learn HOW TO USE xml in flash which is what this book is about. I would probably not use office but I learned alot about processing the xml files that were created by the office program. Anyways this book took me from 0 knowledge about xml in flash to becoming fairly copmpetent in this subject. I highly recommend this book.

I had to purchase this book for a class I'm taking, and now it's 8 weeks into the semester, and I seriously got nothing at all from this. I'm having better luck looking for tutorials than reading this worthless book. Pictures are horrible, chapters drag on forever, and it's just plain not worth the 40 bucks i lost for this. Find a different book if you're just learning xml and flash, worst purchase in my college years!

I was actually hoping that it would be the perfect companion to the 'PHP for Flash' & 'Advanced PHP for Flash' series but it's more on the intergration between XML/Flash/MSOffice which in the web-designing industry is kinda/sorta useless since seeing that most of the technology used is PHP/ASP and MySQL.

The book is great for learning the basic functionality of XML with Flash but doesn't really give you the in-depth functions that are so widely used today.

Hopefully there will be an 'Advanced' series out soon.

Happy flashing!!!

How to use the XML in the Flash? This is one of the doubts most recurrent in lists and forums of quarrels. Who already tried work in Flash with XML created in one of programs of the Office Package definitively already lost the patience, much calm is necessary to reach the accurate node of the correct skill.

Sometimes we obtain alternatives, but almost always having to lose much time to carry through simple tasks. There the book "Foundation XML for Flash" of the Friends of ED publishing company enters, it presents simple solutions for who works with this type of archive, shows as to work with archives of the Word, Excel, Access besides instruct to work with Web services and much more.

It is a perfect book for who wants have complete reference regarding about the Flash and XML theme.

This clearly written and well-organized book provides an overview of XML and how to use XML structured data in a variety of Flash projects. Anyone who is interested in working with XML in Flash and would like to learn more about how to get started will benefit from the easy-to-follow examples and the range of topics that the author has chosen to cover. Beginning with an overview of XML the chapters quickly move on to show how Flash can use XML data. The content is addressed to both Flash designers and developers. While Flash developers may already be familiar with the uses and specifications for XML schemas, Xpath, and XSLT; many Flash designers will gain an appreciation for many of the complexities of XML, as well as insight into the Web Services model. Later chapters, for example, reveal how to use Microsoft Word, Excel and Access to create XML content.

As one who can manage Flash ActionScripting, but who does not have a strong programming background, I found the background into the various XML types to be quite helpful. The book does an excellent job of explaining entities, relationships, schemas and how to navigate an XML object in order to show the how to use XML content with Flash. I was particularly interested in the many applications for e-learning and found the blend of author's screenshots, code examples and main text to provide a nice balance of learning styles.

I learned a lot from this work and am sure that it would be useful to people who are already familiar with Flash and want to learn more about how to use XML with this program.

This is a pretty good book, but the examples need to show step by step in picture what is taking place. The first snag I ran into was the quick start. It tells you to do an outline and use the lathe modifier. There needed to be a picture of how he set up his spline. All we got was the finished lathed image. Until I loaded the file and removed the lathe modifier, I had no idea how he had drawn th intial spline. Overall it provides good instructions and I am glad to see better quality models than the ones in MAX 6 bible. Who wants to get taught how to use software, if the models look cheesy?

This book suffers from the almost universal problem that most computer instructional guides do... lack of any educational theory in its writing. It does not guide the newcomer through the art of learning the software, but rather deals with issues as if one is going through the menu commands. The tutorials consistantly use elements and commands that one will not cover for another hundred por more pages, and the chapters are not designed to "build on the student's knowledge" but rather to give all information about a given cocept right from the beginning. Thus, I am taught how to personalise the user interface and use XREFs (external references) before I am told how to create even the simplest of objects.

I am an experienced 3D analylist, with knowledge of CAD and GIS, so I am not the least experienced of readers on this topic. Even so I found it frequently infuriating to attempt to learn this software using this book.

The book covers a great deal of 3d max. But I was looking for instructions on how to make something glow once, so I thought of Render Post, Max's lens effects UI. I looked at the book and it had a "tiny" and yes I mean "tiny" section on Render Post. Absolutely nothing endepth.
So if you're looking for a great all around book that has small pieces of most aspects inside Max, (not every thing and endepth in everything like I thought it might be because of the word Bible) this book is the ticket.

This big book really covers a lot of territory. Whether you are a beginner or more advanced, there is plenty of great information.

I purchased this book so I could get a handle on some of the new features in 3D Studio Max 7, and guess what, It's got just about everything in it. The tutorials are pretty simple stuff,(no real eye candy here) but the principals learned are great.
I'd recomend this book to anybody using this software, It will give you a great grounding to try out your own ideas on creating special effects and the like.
Well done Kelly L. Murdock for producing such a complete reference manual.

This should have been an excellent book. I bought it after carefully considering many other books with similar focus (including reading the Amazon reader reviews). I've been using DW since version 2 and certainly didn't want a basic primer. This book promised to zero in on exactly what I wanted: using DWMX to create dynamic sites with ASP.

All 5 authors seem to be knowledgeable and competent writers; a single author wrote each chapter. But IMO this book sorely needed editing for overall consistency and comprehensiveness. The whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

I suppose I was expecting something structured along the lines of Wrox's "Beginning ASP Databases": an ongoing, easy-to-implement tutorial that illustrates all of the theory in a consistent manner.

But the tutorials in this book were fragmented and difficult to follow, each one using different conventions, and often omitting information (which was sometimes found in later chapters but would have been useful earlier).

I'd love to see a second edition of this book that takes all of this information but presents it in a more cohesive manner. As it is, in order to set up PWS and get any of the examples to work, I had to rely heavily on other books and online tutorials (notably the Webthang tutorials for DWMX). It's been an exercise in frustration.

Being a beginner to the world of database driven web applications I found this book somewhat useful. My only major beef with the book is that in my experience using the tutorials and exercises and trying to apply them to ASP.NET, the screens and server behaviors didn't match up correctly leaving me scratching my head and randomly searching Dreamweaver's pull-down menus for the correct item to match my current tutorial step? Now I'm not sure if this book was just too early for the .NET world and I am trying to apply the latest and greatest technology to a inappropriate book or if the marketing for this book was just too ambitious? Overall a decent book, but don't bank on this being your "bible" if you are working in ASP.NET.

This book was a total let down.

I had great hopes when I scanned the contents of the book, but the whole book is badly written, and gives an overall impression of being rushed through.

There are far better books for creating dynamic sites with Macromedia products, and I strongy urge anyone to seek alternative reading.

Very disappointing.

This book is not for beginners. So if your new to data driven web sites, This book is not for you. Its starts of with just a few pages telling you about the new advances made within dreamweaver and just dives straight in at the deep end about the dynamic stuff. WHY CAN'T THESE AUTHORS WRITE IN A SIMPLE MANNER? They seem to assume that evrybody knows as much as them. Anyhow can I have my money back, please?

I went through this book and can now design dynamic data-driven ASP pages. Since Macromedia is focused on Cold-Fusion it is a relief to have a reference that explains using DreamweaverMX with ASP. There are more hosting providers available offering ASP hosting (at a reasonable price) than offer Cold Fusion (usually adds 20 or more US dollars a month to the base cost of hosting). So it is "cheaper" to work with ASP. I found this book to be very helpful and highly recommend this to anyone who wants to move from static pages to dynamic. It covers all the basics you would need to connect to a database and build recordsets and use the behaviors in DWMX. There is tons of info on the internet also. This book taught me a lot in a short amount of time and then I found all sorts of sites on the internet that had tutorials or free downloads. After reading this book I was able to understand the things on these various websites. I could then zero-in on a particular solution to something I was doing for a client's site and get the answer either from the book or from an online source. The foundation I got from this book has enabled me to dive deeper into DWMX and take better advantage of its many tools. I had a design background (Quark, Illustrator etc) and needed to make the jump to the "dark side" - programming and handcoding. This book de-mystified those scary subjects and I am now seeing lines of code in my sleep.

While this is an excellent book, the author does leave out a few steps here and there, so those not well acquainted with Photoshop might give up. Also, I would have liked to see more references to the artists whose work is being emulated.

There are a lot of good ideas provided in this book for some very cool effects. However, please know that many of the effects/settings are very specific to the images they use in the examples. Your results will vary greatly with your own photos so it will take quite a bit of tweaking.

I would like to thank John Beardsworth for writing this book as it has given me much pleasure in replicating his creations and following his recipes are so easy. The quality of the printing of the book is superb.I look forward to hours of enjoyment making my own paintings.

The concept is interesting & it is fun to try the different recipes, but many many errors mar the book. Also, some the instructions are less than clear.

There are many web sites with better information. Take a look on them.

Besides the few mistakes that make it difficult to compile code etc. the book is very good for beginners. It starts with the basics of windows programming framework then adds DirectX, onto 2d graphics then finishes with 3d. Each chapter has questions to test your knowledge and it CLEARLY states the answers are in the Appendix which ISN'T included. I have contacted them and they just state, "nope no appendix sorry". So if you are unsure of an answer your never going to know the answer. It also has a program he uses called meshview which doesn't come with ALL SDK's (maybe I have a newer one that has it removed). So the whole section on optimizing mesh's is worthless to me (I have searched for it on the SDK ON THE BOOK's CD!! and online to no avail) Things like that throughout the book make it just a so so book to me. Anyhow don't expect a complete 100% thorough book.

Jonathan S. Harbour is an excellent author. His books are very informative and very easy to read. He has a knack for taking subject matter that would put you to sleep, and making it fun to read.

This book has exellent information, but the author spends little time emphasizing the basics. I am about halfway through the book and i have just stopped reading it becuase it is so confusing. I am very experienced in php, and know basic C and C++, and was surprized i found it so difficult to understand. If you can catch on quick enough though then im sure the information given is great, i expecially loved the first few chapers before the code, where he explained about api's and how directx works...

I was very disappointed with this book. There was insufficient instruction regarding the installation of the DirectX SDK. Most of the source code is incompatible with the included compiler. After manually entering the source code into the Visual C++ IDE, most of the programs would not compile. Thinking I may have made some typographical errors or overlooked some of the code, I then copied the source code directly from the included CD and became even more frustrated that this code would not compile either. Don't waste your money on this book.

I've had this book for two days now and am already half-way through it and the examples. Please NOTE*** Something that is reiterated throughout the beginning chapters is that this book is an introduction to GAME programming using directx, not an introduction to game PROGRAMMING. The code in this book is developed using a C/C++ compiler, and the brilliant author uses Microsoft Visual C++. As the author mentions many times, you should be knowledgable in C/C++ to really have a good understanding of the code. That being said, even his explanations of every line of code shouldn't confuse someone at least familiar with some programming.

The writing style might be somewhat "cheesey" to some readers, but I felt myself so enthralled in the book that I couldn't put it down. Mr. Harbour inspires you to want to develop games.

While I haven't yet reached the 3D part of the book, I really liked the explanations on Windows programming, and the eventual directx programming. One of the best "features" of this book is how the author explains what the different lines of code actually do. Too many books give you code without telling you what it does.

I recommend this book especially if you have no idea how a game is programmed. I do have a lot of programming experience, but not low-level windows programming. I had no idea how to display a window, or to 'blit' a surface. Now I do!

Lastly, I've seen some people said they had trouble with compiling the source code. I haven't tried it with the given compiler, but if you download the FREE MS Visual C++ Express, make sure you aren't using a UNICODE character set, then you shouldn't see any problems.