Macromedia FreeHand MX for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide

Rating:
Summary: Adaptation of help file not quite a QuickStart
Review: I would have rated this book a one. I settled for two stars as I did actually learn a few things from it. This book is quite obviously an adaptation of a FreeHand 10 book (which I understand Sandee has written) as there are some remnants of v.10 functionality that has been changed and updated in MX. Ms. Cohen seems to have missed these. Inconsistencies, unnecessary repetition, gaping holes (Polygon options in the Object panel) and incorrect information - Page coordinates start at the top left of the page?
As an educator myself I find the sequence of information to be unintuitive; working with views before you even have anything on a page to view becomes a bit conceptual and difficult to grasp for the beginner.
Sandee, like almost everyone who writes a book on computer illustration, claims she has the answers to master the ever confusing Pen tool and Bézier curves, I understand them yet found myself reading Chapter 6's eight pages over and over again to figure out what her amazing insight was, especially with regard to connector curves. If you have never worked with a vector illustration package before, I would not recommend this book, you'd do better to print out the help file (which suffers from the same problems as this book), in fact, since they are so similar, I wonder if it's this book that is based on the help file or vice-versa. This book provides (almost) complete step-by-step instructions on using each tool and panel and Xtra and whatever (with some useful advanced functionality) but very little real life application or examples. It will probably serve me as a reference tool for particular functionality on certain tools but little else.