Rating: 
Summary: Stay Away From This One !
Review: This book is one of the biggest publishing jokes I ever seen. It is full of unattractive and boring tutorials. It comes with inadequate CD, and to top it all, it has plethora of MEL and expression errors rendering it pretty much useless. As many of you, I was exited to get my hands on the first book on Maya. The publisher description presented the book really well, and I bought the book right when it came out. I must congratulate to who ever wrote the synopsis, because I would love to have them when I have a bridge, or a lump of coal to sell. I expected a professional book, written for a professional. Instead I was immediately disappointed, and shocked with the mediocrity of the tutorial movies. Anyone, who is artistically inclined, would probably be put off by them. I decided, therefore, to look at this book from a technical point of view, since it clearly was not aesthetically pleasing. I jumped right into the tutorials, which very quickly became boring and somewhat hard to follow. The author seems to have a lot of digital effects knowledge, but he just can not present it well. The book is full of unnecessary screen shots, "tasks" and "note" sections, formatted with huge margins, and large font, ballooning it to over 500 pages. All this in apparent effort to make it more attractive for the reader, and make him/her feel like she is really getting something by buying it. In the end, however, there is a lot of publishing fuss and tricks we could expect from a high school paper, and not a lot of substance. This little substance, would still be useful for a reader, if the tutorials were not plagued with simple errors in MEL and expression scripts. It is incredibly frustrating to spend a lot of time figuring out why things are not working the way they should. This frustration doesn't even compare to how you feel when you discover that it was not your fault, but a simple typo, or mistake made by the author. Unfortunately, you will feel like that a lot reading this book. You will not only have to double check for your own mistakes when you type in the scripts, but also check if the author didn't leave any. Yes, I wrote "type in the scripts," because the CD does not include any of them. This might be fine with small, one or two line scripts, but I thought the reason for a CD in the back of the book, was just for such occasions. I also expected the CD to have scenes for each tutorial, shaders used, and other resources that could actually be useful. Instead we get few sample movies, sketches, plugin or two, and the always favorite, free models. Bottom-line - stay away from this book. It makes me mad that we have to pay ___ and get little in return. This book was obviously rushed through production, because of its many mistakes, half thought out tutorials, and week CD content.
Rating:
Summary: Badly Written, Not Worth the Money
Review: This book is painful for people who do not know Maya and it is practically useless for those who do. People somewhere in the middle may learn a thing or two, but overall I believe this to be a waste of money. If you have the program, you have the manuals, and they will play a better role in helping you with Maya than this book. The front cover is a testament to the rushed nature of this book, and the almost careless attitude with which it was released. The art samples, done in Maya from some of the tutorials in it, are [bad], and as soon as I saw the cover I became very nervous about the hard-earned money flying out of my pocket to the land of lost cash. In dire need of extensive re-writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Recommended!
Review: This is a good book. No other effects book covers the theory as well as this. Just for the theory, it is worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: This is a good overview of the fundamentals in technical animation. A good link in both basics and practical production. If the images are in color, that will be even more wonderful!
Rating: 
Summary: Alright
Review: This is an alright book with miss printed error like those that said below. If you know maya, it's quite good. But if you dont, it can be painful.
Rating: 
Summary: From the author...
Review: When I was given the greenlight from Alias Wavefront and my publisher to write this book , it took me seven months to research, design, and complete the manuscripts (not the book yet). This is considerably longer than the norm. It is because I don't think the readers are interested to read another Maya manual and neither am I interested to just jump on the Maya bandwagon and start reproducing a book on Maya basics, which the software manual has very well covered.When this book was written, I've in mind what I think an effects animator and technical director would need to know. I don't want to create a book that covers A-Z of a software application and provide nice little demos for illustrations. There are many books that serve that purpose. What I want to create is a book that I will also want to keep it for my reference. A book that provides emphasis to our young readers on the real issues of production animation. Thus the emphasis on this book has been on producing commercial quality effects animation and developing the readers' problem solving skills. Although Maya is used throughout the book, several concepts and discussion can be applied to other software of your choice. The book divides effects animation into 5 elements: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and Dynamics. It first covers various theories and practices that are essential for an effects animator and technical director to comprehend. These topics include the basics of particle animation, procedural concepts, function curves, modeling, lighting, rendering, and compositing. The second part of the book takes the readers through a series of carefully designed tutorials. Through the tutorials, the readers will, hopefully, not only acquire the knowledge of using Maya in creating production quality animation but also understand and develop his/her own problem solving skills. The tutorials cover include creating fire, water, splashes, dust, clouds, explosions, terrain, soft and rigid body dynamics, writing Maya plug-ins using C++, and developing a control system (similar to crowd control system) using entirely MEL. I hope that you will find this approach of writing, and the content to be inspiring and useful. And hopefully this book will serve to be your future effects animation reference.
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