Pagemaker 3.5: Design and Applications

Rating:
Summary: Decent tech content but frustrates hands-on learning.
Review: This book is one dog that not only won't hunt, but shouldn't have even come out of the publishing kennel. I must give it credit for having decent theoretical info, but Pagemaker is useless if you can't DO it. The instructions were created by a writer who does not understand the need for linear sequential logic (which is very strong in Adobe's Pagemaker "Classroom in a Book".) The instructions often do not result in the output the book's examples show. Perhaps this is supposed to be a wonderful lesson in independence & figuring out how to make a project work--but I can do that in real time. This "let us mess with your mind like a schizophrenic supervisor" method frustrates rather than enhances the learning process. In addition, the book occasionally instructs the user to make menu selections that aren't there, and at times specific parameters the user is instructed to hunt down in examples are non-existent.

Speaking of which, this brilliant author requires flipping back & forth between instructions & examples (as in, when reading the instructions, the reader is told to flip to the example to get parameters that the author is too lazy to make immediately accessible in the instructions as well as visually displayed in the example). I hate this book. Save yourself 50 bucks & more than 50 hours of frustration by getting anything else--Classroom in a Book is excellent.