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Title: Real World Adobe InDesign 2 by Olav Kvern, David Blatner ISBN: 0-201-77317-1 Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub. Date: 26 December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good Reference (Batteries not included)
Comment: This book does not come in lessons, and it does not really give you much to do with InDesign, it just tells you how to use the features, shows a bunch of shortcuts, and gives a bit of advice here and there. There is also the occasional attempt at levity, which unfortunately doesn't always succeeed.
Despite all that, I am very satisfied: as a reference for how InDesign works and how to use its tools, it is an excellent choice. If you are unfamiliar with Illustrator and/or Photoshop, then perhaps another, more lesson/project-oriented book might be a better choice; though it is not utterly mind-numbing, this book is not really a cover-to-cover read, and without the background in Illustrator or Photoshop, you might just come away wondering if you learned anything. However, if you DO have that background, then this is a great start. For me ... this book has earned it's place on the shelf.
Rating: 5
Summary: In Depth coverage of InDesign
Comment: This book is recommended by the Adobe InDesign Development Team and I can see why. Kvern and Blatner cover all of the basics you would expect; page layout, text controls, type characteristics, drawing, transparency, importing, exporting, color, printing, etc.
But it's the depth at which they are able to cover each area that is astounding. Anyone who has used InDesign 2 knows it has a zillion palettes and tools. This book covers them all in great detail. I venture to say that you would be hard pressed to come up with a question about InDesign 2 that this book doesn't cover.
And they put their money where their collective mouth is. They laid out the entire 650 page book using InDesign 2. One of them used a Titanium Powerbook running OS X and the other used Windows. A nice demo of its true cross-platform capabilities.
I was particularly impressed by how they showed the differences in results you get when performing a task (such as transforming the contents within a path), depending on which options are selected. This is the best reference book on InDesign I've seen. I like the Adobe Classroom in a Book, but wouldn't use it as my handy reference on how to do some little obscure thing.
I didn't realize how powerful the drawing tools in InDesign are until I read this book. And I didn't understand the difference between downsampling and subsampling (for exporting as a PDF), but they explain it well.
There is a nice section on managing long documents, their tables of contents and indices.
Rating: 2
Summary: Too much like a manual
Comment: This book is a reasonably thorough coverage of InDesign but is sadly lacking in what I would describe as advanced areas. Like many other books a lot of it simply resembles a product manual, describing, but often not explaining, the functions and options. For example in the Workspace chapter it defines baseline grid and document grid but gives no advice whatsoever how you would use these (and no reference to further information elsewhere).
Although the style is pleasantly conversational it sometimes rambles into unecessarily detail, like explaining that ultraviolet light is around 700 nanometers - who cares - this is supposed to be about publishing.
Examples of less than expert advice abound: a discussion on line art states that these are bitmaps that only have black and white pixels - in my book you should never use bitmaps for line art; and I couldn't believe a paragraph that stated most fonts have a ½ character but there's no way to type it - the authors have obviously never used a PC!
But most annoying of all, it barely touches on InDesign's most advanced features, namely its strong interaction with XML and powerful scripting ability. Indeed the book states that an example of transformation using XML, XSL and InDesign tagged text will be posted on the Peachpit website. Not so but after a few e-mails I was able to get some helpful examples from the authors.
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Title: InDesign 2 for Macintosh and Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide) by Sandee Cohen ISBN: 0201794780 Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.99 |
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Title: InDesign for QuarkXPress Users by David Blatner, Christopher Smith, Steve Werner ISBN: 0321159489 Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.99 |
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Title: Adobe InDesign 2.0 Classroom in a Book by Adobe Creative Team ISBN: 0201787202 Publisher: Adobe Press Pub. Date: 03 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Essentials of Adobe InDesign 2 by Michael S. Witherell, Kevin A. Siegel ISBN: 1891762788 Publisher: IconLogic, Inc. Pub. Date: 22 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
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Title: Real World Adobe Illustrator 10 by Deke McClelland ISBN: 0201776308 Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub. Date: 19 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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