Adobe Scripting: Your Visual Blueprint to Scripting in Photoshop and Illustrator

Rating:
Summary: Great Starter Book
Review: Great book to get started in scripting. Well explained with good clear examples. The only down side is that it is to brief.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic but out-of-date
Review: This book is written extremely well and perfect for someone like me who knows plenty of scripting languages but just needs help with the details in Photoshop and Illustrator.

The major problem is that this book was published in January of 2003 and was written for Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10. Naturally, I have the CS package and that is just too new for this publication. When you run many many of the scripts (maybe most of them... I stopped using their examples after the first few) it hangs Photoshop or causes other errors. One "new document" script actually killed my G5 (first time ever I had to reboot from a crash!).

I phoned the company who made the book (maranGraphics) and they were not helpful. There is no new version of this book planned nor is there an "updates" website or any further help.

My advice: Unless you are working with only older versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, skip this book. Instead, use the PDFs that come with the CS package. They are as helpful as this book will be to you without the problems that will cause crashes.

My advice to Maran: You should take a clue from other companies that make tech help books and provide a free "updates" site that includes differences between your book and later releases of software or any errata or whatnot. As it is, this book is only good for a few months and as specialized as this topic is, that means few sales.