Teach Yourself VISUALLY Illustrator 10

Rating:
Summary: Thank God for this book.
Review: I work in web programming, and I'm learning Illustrator for some projects I'm doing. This program is INCREDIBLY complex, and even though I'm very familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator is like a mirror maze. Everything you think you recognize is really an illusion.

After failing miserably at learning the program through a few hours of trial and error, I decided I definitely needed a book to help me. After signing out a number of different Adobe Illustrator books from the library and devouring them, I still wasn't sure what the heck was going on. Sure, I knew lots of stuff I could do, but no one ever bothered to tell me how to work the tools I had to use! I wanted remedial help here. I can firgure out the rest of it once I know how the darned program works.

So finally, I stumbled across Teach Yourself Visually. And thank God I did. These people understand that when you're learning a new program, you need to learn the interface before you can do anything else. Apparently this simple logic is something that MOST manual writers can't grasp.

It's not as big a book as many of the other Illustrator manuals I've read--in fact, it's positively normal-sized. And most of the book is taken up by big full-color screenshots. In fact, that's how you learn with this book. Lots of big full-color screenshots, showing you step-by-step how to operate the program. Each screenshot has a caption telling you just what's going on in the picture, what tools, settings, and menu options you need to select, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, this book is perfect. To be honest, I think its usefulness is limited. It's not one of those tomes of arcane lore that you lovingly refer to every time you work on a project. It's a simple, bottom-line tutorial. But that just makes it more important.

I'm not a stupid person. I've taught myself things like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Javascript with only minimal help from any kind of reference manual. So trust me: you NEED this book if you want to learn Illustrator within a year. Once you finish it, then move on to all those cool books like The Essential Illustrator. You'll keep those around for a while. But the buck starts here.

Rating:
Summary: Thank God for this book.
Review: I work in web programming, and I'm learning Illustrator for some projects I'm doing. This program is INCREDIBLY complex, and even though I'm very familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator is like a mirror maze. Everything you think you recognize is really an illusion.

After failing miserably at learning the program through a few hours of trial and error, I decided I definitely needed a book to help me. After signing out a number of different Adobe Illustrator books from the library and devouring them, I still wasn't sure what the heck was going on. Sure, I knew lots of stuff I could do, but no one ever bothered to tell me how to work the tools I had to use! I wanted remedial help here. I can firgure out the rest of it once I know how the darned program works.

So finally, I stumbled across Teach Yourself Visually. And thank God I did. These people understand that when you're learning a new program, you need to learn the interface before you can do anything else. Apparently this simple logic is something that MOST manual writers can't grasp.

It's not as big a book as many of the other Illustrator manuals I've read--in fact, it's positively normal-sized. And most of the book is taken up by big full-color screenshots. In fact, that's how you learn with this book. Lots of big full-color screenshots, showing you step-by-step how to operate the program. Each screenshot has a caption telling you just what's going on in the picture, what tools, settings, and menu options you need to select, etc.

As far as I'm concerned, this book is perfect. To be honest, I think its usefulness is limited. It's not one of those tomes of arcane lore that you lovingly refer to every time you work on a project. It's a simple, bottom-line tutorial. But that just makes it more important.

I'm not a stupid person. I've taught myself things like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Javascript with only minimal help from any kind of reference manual. So trust me: you NEED this book if you want to learn Illustrator within a year. Once you finish it, then move on to all those cool books like The Essential Illustrator. You'll keep those around for a while. But the buck starts here.

Rating:
Summary: I'd Be Lost Without Book; Don't Take Illustrator Without It
Review: People told me Illustrator was easier to learn than Photoshop. Were they wrong! Or maybe they didn't know I'm bad at math because Illustrator is based on bezier curves, vector shapes, math and geometry. It is about as different from Photoshop as a program can be except that they look the same when you first open them up. Just try "drawing" (and I use that word loosely) a curve in Illustrator with the pen tool and you will instantly recall everything you ever hated about high school math. However, if you loved math, this may be YOUR program. This book deserves 5 stars simply because I would be utterly lost without it. I'm taking Illustrator Part II right now at the college where I teach and I still can't move off this book and into a more complex text. I tried moving into the Adobe Classroom in a Book and very quickly found myself unable to do anything in the exercises. I am learning this program very, very slowly and I need an extremely visual, full color approach that spells out every step to me, skipping nothing, assuming nothing. This book does that. I'm very slowly improving in the program. I used it in taking Illustrator Part I (it was not the required text which I didn't even buy) and got an A in the first course yet I still can't move into a more complex book. In this course I have to make an entire calendar for 2003, draw it, and I hope to have this book mastered by the end of it and then, finally, move onto a more complex text. I'm not counting on it though.

Rating:
Summary: I'd Be Lost Without Book; Don't Take Illustrator Without It
Review: People told me Illustrator was easier to learn than Photoshop. Were they wrong! Or maybe they didn't know I'm bad at math because Illustrator is based on bezier curves, vector shapes, math and geometry. It is about as different from Photoshop as a program can be except that they look the same when you first open them up. Just try "drawing" (and I use that word loosely) a curve in Illustrator with the pen tool and you will instantly recall everything you ever hated about high school math. However, if you loved math, this may be YOUR program. This book deserves 5 stars simply because I would be utterly lost without it. I'm taking Illustrator Part II right now at the college where I teach and I still can't move off this book and into a more complex text. I tried moving into the Adobe Classroom in a Book and very quickly found myself unable to do anything in the exercises. I am learning this program very, very slowly and I need an extremely visual, full color approach that spells out every step to me, skipping nothing, assuming nothing. This book does that. I'm very slowly improving in the program. I used it in taking Illustrator Part I (it was not the required text which I didn't even buy) and got an A in the first course yet I still can't move into a more complex book. In this course I have to make an entire calendar for 2003, draw it, and I hope to have this book mastered by the end of it and then, finally, move onto a more complex text. I'm not counting on it though.

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful
Review: This book seems to be just a bunch of pictures of different screens from Illustrator without any explanations. I have gleaned a few useful tips, but I think a book with some step-by-step guides for a few creative projects would be much more helpful than this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful
Review: This book seems to be just a bunch of pictures of different screens from Illustrator without any explanations. I have gleaned a few useful tips, but I think a book with some step-by-step guides for a few creative projects would be much more helpful than this book.