Publishing with InDesign

Rating:
Summary: A Practical and FUN guide to InDesign
Review: From the moment I opened Publishing With InDesign I was drawn to the author's no-nonsense approach to applying the software. He cuts to the chase with an informative, concise narrative that helps make a very complex layout program approachable.

Especially usefully are the projects presented throughout the book. I found them to clearly emphasize the capabilities of the program. They were fun to do and they gave me confidence to attempt large-scale, complicated projects almost immediately. I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking to get and stay current with one of the newest and most powerful softwares on the market.

Rating:
Summary: A hard read.
Review: I have read several books by this author/teacher/designer. I have to say that although he has written some usefull books, such as Printing in a Digital world, (which is now a bit out of date, but much of the same information is covered in his other, newer books), Publishing with In-Design suffers from a too narrow point of view. It is a textbook, and should not be considered a "Quickee reference book" on In-Design. It is not the best example of writing either. It is dense, not particularly well organized, and suffers also from a sort of train-of-thought writing style that reads as if he wrote it one page at a time, front to back, and didn't look back. It also has many typos, and I don't find the author's personal viewpoint on certain matters to be interesting or well conveyed.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Ever
Review: This is by far the worst book on software and publishing I have ever read. Not only is filled with pretentious opinions of the author, who continually reminds us how much experience, but it never gets into the software it's supposed to be about. It's more about graduating from office secretarial design, (maybe using PageMaker) to commercial publishing. The books is badly designed itself, and poorly written, with poor typography to boot. It offers next to nothing about the program InDesign and most of its other content seems to be recirculated PageMaker publishing advice. (Getting It Printed is much better for publishing information.) I have never felt so ripped off in my life.