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Rating: 
Summary: Quickly find what you look for
Review: Don't want to read long texts about how to do something? Rather want to look at pictures? Then this book is for you. It is a visual reference book, full with screenshots of the relevant dialogs and menus, in an easy to find things in and well organized book. If you quickly want to find that particular thing you suddenly do not remember how to do, find it here.
I warmly recommend this book. It is a very good reference in combination with the Real World InDesign CS book. You first look in this one. Then, if you want to dig deeper, you read on in Real World InDesign CS.
Rating: 
Summary: Best book on InDesign out there
Review: Everything in this book is done well. Ms. Cohen knows how to show things visually, and packs a lot into this volume. I also had bought "InDesign for QuarkXPress Users" and never use it because this book is all I need. Its well-organized, easy-to-use format makes looking up how to do something a breeze. The only downside is that it would do better with color, but if B&W keeps the price down, I'm all for it.
You want to divide your page into rows and columns, boom, there it is, page 30. You want to know all the ways you can wrap text, boom, there it is, pages 216-220. Copy and apply text attributes on-the-fly with the eyedropper? Copy and paste in place, change case, fake an italic (skew), and all other good stuff QuarkXPress can't do. These goodies go on and on -- lots of stuff you'd go into Illustrator or Photoshop to do, but don't have to. Want totally controllable drop shadows on text or a placed object? It's in there. Want to set a giant headline, create outlines of the text and fill the letters with a photo or illustration? It's in there! All w/recognizable Adobe interface.
Thank you, Adobe, and thank you, Sandee Cohen, for writing the missing manual.
Rating:
Summary: Great for former Quark users
Review: Once our design dept. made the switch from XPress to InDesign, I was thrown overnight into a new program with much more functionality, but with a definite learning curve. Most designers don't have the luxury of learning new software at their convenience; the more common scenario is "baptism by fire." So I turned to this book, having learned quickly from other Visual Quickstart guides in the past.
The result? It kept my head afloat in my first few weeks with InDesign. Part of the brilliance of this and other VQGs is that the information is presented in numbered, step-by-step directions. I prefer this over paragraphs of text, from which I'd have to extract the most vital information, on deadline.
Because a how-to book's value is only as good as its index, this book wisely contains a 30+ page index for quick reference; it's usually the first place I look to solve a problem. Cheers to Sandee Cohen for a smartly written, comprehensive (562 pages!) guide for new InDesigners. My colleagues and I keep our copies close by.
Rating:
Summary: Complete, Easy to Read, and FUNNY
Review: Some of the visual quickstart books are better than the others. This one is one of the best in the whole bunch!The author really knows her stuff. She covers every important aspect of the program in a fun, easy to read style. The step-by-step lessons are incredibly easy to follow. You don't need any special files to learn the program. Just open the book to any page and learn the specific task you need to know. The book is organized not just by the program's features, but by the type of projects you'd be working on. For instance, the chapter on Long Documents has all the exercises you'd want for those type of files. The author also has some very good background stories about working in advertising and design. So you learn not just InDesign, but about things like spot color, preparing files for printing, and working with PDFs. There are plenty of books that cost twice the price of this one. But you can't find anything as good for this price.
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