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Title: Fireworks: For Windows and Macintosh (Visual quickstart guide) by Sandee Cohen ISBN: 0-201-35361-X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub. Date: 01 July, 1998 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $18.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (9 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Not For the Beginner
Comment: This book (despite it's intent) is not really a beginner's book. I'm not certain really where it belongs. The author fails to explain some things; as if taking it for a fact that the reader is a person with some experience. Now, bashing aside, I found the book useful in several cases. Fireworks is an awesome tool, especially when used in conjuntion with Dreamweaver. However, Fireworks is not an end-all be-all. Some of the "side effects" or quirks, ascribed to the book in previous reviews, are actually Fireworks doing. Where the author fails is in explaining these anomolies. The book is organized well with a chapter for each of the following subjects: Basics, Document Setup, Colors, Path Tools, Selecting Paths, Working With Objects, Fills, Strokes, Effects, Text, Automation, Pixels, Importing, Optimizing (this is really good), Animation, Hotspots/Links, Slices (a difficult subject, made easier by the author. I spent a lot of time here), Behaviors, and Exporting. There are appendices for: Defaults, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Regular Expressions. A decent index rounds out the book. I would have liked more in-depth information on connecting JavaScript to objects and also some of the pitfalls of integrating Fireworks projects into Dreamweaver, or integrating Flash objects into Fireworks. If you want to learn how to use Fireworks, then my suggestion is to go through the Tutorial included with the downloadable (and Full) versions of the product. If you would like to expand your knowledge or perhaps fill in the gaps, then this book is good for that. However, I suggest that readers check out the "Fireworks 3 Bible" as a better buy.

Rating: 2
Summary: Completely overrated. Save $$, buy the Fireworks PDF manual
Comment: I was psyched to get a book about fireworks to figure out all those things that you can't from the program itself. I've been very disappointed with this book. It gives the exact same information as the Fireworks PDF manual does. Just repeating the basics is NOT why a person should write a book about a program. I've only used fireworks for a little while and there are some great things about the program. Unfortunately, this book did not give me the added info that I was looking for. It also doesn't even mention some very confusing things that take place when using the program. It does a poor job at describing why certain things happen... like simple Javascript rollovers. You can create 4 states for a rollover and have the option of including all or just one on your webpage. Unfortunately, the book doesn't go into detail about HOW to have the 3rd and 4th states show up on your webpage. When I emailed the author, Sandee Cohen, she gave me the same terse, incomprehensible answer as her book does about this. Another weird thing is when you export Javascript rollover images, it automatically creates a one pixel gif image that it inserts into the HTML table it creates for the rollovers, supposedly for "proper alignment" of the table. The program says nothing about this. I only noticed because this GIF isn't transparent and was creating these tiny black dots on my page. Not only does the book not even bother mentioning this, but when I emailed the author, she claimed that using this gif was ESSENTIAL for properly aligning images in a table. Frankly, in 2 1/2 yrs of studying web design, I've never heard nor read anything about this. No instructor or book that I've run across has even mentioned it. If it's so important as the author states, why doesn't the book address it?? I just took these annoying gifs out of my code... and the rollovers/images are just fine. So much for the ESSENTIALNESS of these gifs.

Another example is that in the section on ImageMaps, the book doesn't mention that ImageMaps and Sliced object are exported slightly differently.... and doesn't even SAY in the ImageMap section, the information you need to know to export one!

I could go on about the difficulties I encountered attempting to use this book.... but if you buy the book, you'll find out for yourself. Amazing how just a little book of only 250 pages can be so confusing to find what your'e looking for. Don't waste your $$. Just download the Fireworks PDF manual or use the one that came with the program until someone finally writes a comprehensive book about a pretty good program.

Rating: 2
Summary: At chap.18 the author forgot to include Windows instructions
Comment: This book was good until Chapter 18 - which is where the How-to of creating rollovers begins. Beginning in Chapter 18, the author forgot she was writting for a Windows and Mac book and only wrote Mac instructions which are of course, very different from Windows. I had to use the tutorial which came with my Fireworks software to figure out how to do a rollover - so in effect, I wasted my time & money with this book. My advice is to look elsewhere for a Fireworks book.