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Summary: Adobe should make this book the manual
Review: After almost a year of struggling with the stupid electronic help and manual that comes with InDesign, I finally gave up and bought the InDesign 2 Visual Guide. Fantastic! Great! Best thing I ever did.Instead of the vague descriptions and no-pictures in the manual, Ms. Cohen has laid out a beatufiul, step by step, explanation of every feature in InDesign. Not only is everything well illustrated, but there are before and after comparisons to see just what the settings do to text, images, and pages. My favorite chapter is the one on imported graphics where you see exactly how to bring images into InDesign and apply transformations to make the images bigger, smaller, and rotated. There are also real clear instructions on how to colorize a black and white photo -- something the teacher at my school said you couldn't do with InDesign. Boy, was he surprised when I showed him the steps. This book is much more than just an InDesign book. It's got tons of pages with background information on all sorts of things dealing with old-time printing, typographics, color separations, and more. The chapters are nicely divided into sections that deal with exactly the subjects I'm looking for. Tabs and Tables is one section, Color is another, and Automation still another. And check out the gray boxes with added information. Those give tons of background stories and tips for working with InDesign as well as many other programs. My only regret about this book is that I should have bought it six months ago. I know I would have been able to do much more with InDesign by now.
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Summary: The Mystery Stops Here!
Review: Great book for learning InDesign. Every time I open InDesign, I pick up this book. No book is perfect, but this is close.
--Book Editor/Layout
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Summary: One of the best visual quick start books
Review: I have a lot of the visual quick start books on my shelf. This is one of the best. The book is organized into very good sections. There's a chapter on basic text, then later there's one on automating text. This is very good since I didn't need to learn the basic stuff, but could jump right into the more advanced features. I really liked the chapter on typography since that is why I switched to the program. The book explains very clearly how to set the typographic controls. There;s a really long chapter on importing graphics that explains very clearly how to import Photoshop files with their transparency settings. I didn't realize ID did that. Awesome. I also like how the pictures are very clear and big enough to read. Some of these books show the program so small you can't read anything in the picture. This book zooms in so you can see what you're doing. Not only is the book easy to understand, well organized, and covers the whole program, it is fun to read. The author tells all these stories about how she uses InDesign, or how things were before computers. For instance, I never knew why the old printers were called strippers. Some of the stories are very funny. There's also a ton of background material on things like the different between process and spot colors; how to define colors, setting the file for prepress, different types of fonts, and more. That's information that I can use working with other programs, not just InDesign.
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Summary: More than what I expected from this Visual Quickstart Guide!
Review: I own several Visual Quickstart Guides and have enjoyed Sandee Cohen's books for several years now and "InDesign for Macintosh & Windows" is a good reference book to have. As mentioned, I'm one of those that try to not visit a bookstore because I end up coming out with too many design books (and yikes, you know how much those books can cost). With InDesign 2.0, there is anticipation for the upcoming Real World InDesign book by Olay Kvern which will be released in September 30th and of course there is Adobe's InDesign 2.0 Classroom in a Book which has been receiving bad reviews due to it's rush release with text omissions and typos galore. But with this book (which is the cheapest among the InDesign books out right now), Sandee Cohen does a great job. Actually, what made me enjoy this book compared to her other books that I have purchased is that she goes into how she makes books with InDesign and from reading her sidenotes, she has passion for the software even though she has taught Quark for over 15 years. When the writer shows enthusiasm about the software and also gives 100% in helping the reader understand in preparation for the print side of their work in InDesign, you can't help but enjoy this book. Many of us who switched to InDesign 2.0 are learning every moment with each product about how cool this software is and this book helps appreciate InDesign even more. She tackles everything from color, styling, layers, pen and beziers, text effects, pages and books, libraries, tabs and tables, automatic text, typography controls, color management, output and so much more. Anyway, for those who want an great reference book for InDesign 2, check out this Visual Quickstart Guide.
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Summary: Great book
Review: I'm a long-time PageMaker user (from version 3) and unlike the person who wrote a most derogatory review of this book : 'they were text oriented' and did not like the pictures, I thought they really helped me learn to use the software. As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words"... Why would one wade through oceans of text when they could look at the pictures of the various palettes and get an overall sense of what Sandee is explaining. This is an excellent book, better than The Classroom in a Book, which I abandoned after purchasing Sandee's book
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Summary: Like the author, hate the series
Review: Maybe I'm just more of a text-o-philic person than the average designer, but I find these Visual QuickStart Guides painful to use. The pages are cluttered and difficult to browse, and I've yet to find anything I'm looking for in the index--even when it's a section I've already read and I know it's in there--so, in fact, I find this book about as useful as the on-line documentation that comes with the program--and if you've seen that, you know it's lousy. Having tons of screenshots is a nice idea, but sometimes a thousand words are worth more than ten pictures, if they keep you from having to switch back and forth from text to example to text to example . . . I find myself wishing she'd just come out and _say_ how to use a feature instead of trying to _show_ me. It's too bad, because I've seen Sandee Cohen speak/demo/present and I know that she knows her stuff. I wish she'd written a normal, discursive text instead of this eyesore that I can neither read straight through nor skim. These seem to be very popular books, so I may be in the minority. My advice, though, is to go to a bricks-and-mortar store and leaf through it to see if the format works for you (the sample pages on this site do not show a typical instructional page, for some reason). When you're ready to buy, come back here, of course. Update: Purchased Blatner & Kvern's _Real World InDesign_ and am getting much more out of it. So if you're a text-oriented person like me, you may have better luck with that book. Sorry, Sandee!
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Summary: Incredible value for the money
Review: This book is so much better than the official Adobe classroom book. It doesn't have a CD, but it doesn't need one. The excercises are so clearly written, and the illustrations are so good. The book is very good for anyone switching over from QuarkXpress. Ms. Cohen gives loads of little tips for Quark users. Not only does she teach InDesign, but the book is very funny. The description of locked objects had me laughing out loud. That's quite a feat for a how-to computer book.
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Summary: Good for the experienced designer
Review: This is a great book if you already work in the design field, know the software and just want an update on the new features on InDesign 2. If you're a new or aspiring DTP (Desktop Publishing) artist I would recommend another book. I think this book does a fine job of presenting the information, but for people who are not used to working with a page layout program it is hard to know how the examples can be applied to your work.
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Summary: Just what I needed!
Review: Use it everytime I am using/learning In-Design. Would be lost without the quick reference. A must have!
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