If you're looking for thorough, at-home training in any Adobe application, the Classroom in a Book series is a good choice. Slow, deliberate pacing is a hallmark of these well-written books. Readers work through a wide variety of projects using professional-quality graphics and fonts (supplied on a companion CD-ROM). Rather than the personal "avoid-the-mistakes-I-made" quality of many how-tos, the series employs a more serious tone befitting books that are recognized as part of the official Adobe certification training.
Readers begin with a Quick Tour tutorial that briefly covers all of the basics--working with tools and palettes, placing graphics and text. It's a great first dip in the water for those coming from QuarkXPress. From there, the lessons focus in more depth on specific areas: the work environment, setting up a new document with master pages, working with colors and gradients, importing and linking graphics, drawing with vectors, adjusting typography and editing text, creating tables, working with XML, exporting to PDF, color management, and much more. The lessons work best when followed sequentially; each includes many smaller tips that become helpful in later lessons. Sidebars feature handy information from the user's guide. (Although a trial version of the application does not come on the CD-ROM, it's available for download at Adobe.com.)
It's the Photoshop- and Illustrator-type features within InDesign that make it so much more fun to use than rival Quark. This book shows you how to do cool things with transparencies, blending modes, feathered edges, and drop shadows, a lot of which is new to version 2.0. There are also exercises that cover less wow-inducing (but just as time-saving) tools for creating indexes and making tables.
Frequent illustrations and screen shots help readers monitor their progress. Chapter summaries and review questions let beginners test their confidence in the material before moving on, and allow experienced users to skip material they already know.
The book has a few minor errors, a couple of which might just be platform related. Despite these, Adobe InDesign 2.0 Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn a powerful application that makes print design a breeze. --Angelynn Grant
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