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Title: Learning Adobe Framemaker: The Official Guide to Adobe Framemaker by Development Team Sta Adobe Systems Inc ISBN: 1568302908 Publisher: Adobe Press Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $60.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4

Rating: 4
Summary: Detailed and Clear - Easy to follow for beginners!
Comment: Adobe FrameMaker is a powerful tool for putting together a book or a lengthy document where the typical word processing software falls short. Learning FrameMaker, however, proved to be no easy task, because of its many features.

Written by the people at Adobe who gave us FrameMaker the software, this is the Offical Adobe FrameMaker Training book that covers, in the same volume, all the supported platforms: Windows, Mac, and UNIX, including the shortcut keys. After doing the exercises, one can move easily from one platform to another without any problem, which is rare in a training book.

The instructions are clear and easy to follow. Almost every page has screen images of what you should expect to see on your computer. So even if you don't know which is the QuickAccess bar, one look at the picture included and you'd be able to follow along.

I found this book very helpful. I'd never used FrameMaker before but was able to follow the step-by-step instructions with no trouble at all. There are review questions and answers at the back of each lesson to make sure you got it. Also, at school we use the Mac for instructions, but I have a PC at home. This book points out where there are differences between different platforms so that switching computers between school and home is not confusing at all.

Rating: 4
Summary: Learning Adobe FrameMaker lacks three vital tools.
Comment: Learning Adobe FrameMaker lacks three tools that are vital for any beginning writer at my company, which generates thousands of books a year. The missing pieces are: multifile books, indexes, and cross-references. These oversights force me as an instructor to generate my own materials, but as the sole trainer, I have little time for instructional design. I almost discounted purchasing the book for that reason, but the low cost per student convinced me to hang on and fill in the gaps myself. I'm anxious for the so-called "advanced" material--stuff everybody needs from day 1 to work for us!

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent step-by-step. Lacks advanced material.
Comment:

I've taught FrameMaker 5 to hundreds of technical writers, engineers, marketing communicators, and administrative support people, from the original Frame Technology, Inc. materials on which this book is based. This book puts covers around the three days of Frame's five-day course they called "Basics," but does not touch on the topics in the "Advanced" materials. The series does not include an advanced book, yet.

Depending on your learning style and experience, you might want to move faster, scan through some detailed elaborations, jump around in a different order, but nearly everything you need to know about that 3/5 of what FrameMaker can do and how to do it, is in this book, well-presented and illustrated. Because FrameMaker is now nearly identical in 95% of its features and menus on unix, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows platforms, this one book works on all three. Where there are differences you need to see, screen shots or illustrations are shown; where are there differences in how to perform an operation or task, written instructions are given. Only a few, trivial, typos.

What's in the book is good. The downside is what's missing - the material in the two-day "Advanced" course - building books from scratch, using the book tools (managing multiple-file projects by one or more authors as a single set of tasks), tables of contents, indexing, and building templates for these tasks. A "lite" look at these, enough to acquaint authors with their simplest use should be in this book. The "how-to" accomplish tasks and operations is clean, but another thing that's missing is the "why would you want to do this?" context that is important to users not familiar with large complex documentation projects. Experienced technical writers know the why, but as the "technical writing responsibilities" hat is added to more and more multi-hatted job descriptions, the why becomes increasingly important for newcomers.

My rating of what's in the book is 95% or better, but the lack of even introductory peeks at the tools that would complete an author's tookbox is an oversight that needs to be corrected.