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Rating: 
Summary: VISUAL QUICKSTART? PERHAPS TOO QUICK IN WRITING THE BOOK
Review: Ack, I'm beginning to HATE these VQS guides.
This book is more straightforward than the DW VQS, however, often it leaves you hanging and wondering.
Peruse thru some chapters at your local bookstore, and you'll see what I mean. I've come to realize these budget books are no good. How good can a $20 book possibly be? But unfortunately, there aren't too many beginner-intermediate FIREWORKS books out there. I recommend you read FIREWORKS F/X and Design after you torture yourself thru this book. If you find a better book, let me know, but I doubt b/c I've searched enough. PLAYING WITH FIRE isn't that great; if you're smart and compare PLAYING WITH FIRE to the F/X book, you'll quickly see the F/X book is by far better. Slightly more difficult, but hey, you want to learn FIREWORKS or not?
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Summary: Fireworks 4
Review: Fireworks 4 is an excellent book to teach yourself vector graphics, bitmapped graphics and how they concern each other and their use on the web. Fireworks 4 is a "paint" program that deals with the new type of graphic format, .png (ping), that will eventually take over where the .gif format left off but without the liscensing hassles the gif format carries now. Pngs can promise and produce better images than its gif predicessor can and this book is the perfect example to show you how. With its pictorial format, its easy to understand and hard to put down as lessons and examples easily appear on your screen like you had nothing to do with it. Great Book for learning about png graphics and how they fit with Macromedia's Dreamweaver HTML editor. Le Guepe (Dan Newell)
Rating: 
Summary: Great for the computer savy user
Review: I truly enjoy the Quickstart series of computer books. They're informative, detailed and the content is easy to find. In fact, their books were used as my textbooks in college and I liked them so much I continue to use them. But I won't say that these books aren't for a specific type of person. I will explain. If you've ever picked up a Whatever-for-Dummies book, or the Idiot's-Guide-for-something or any kind of Textbooks-for-Morons you either like them or hate them. Why? Because they all seem to be written at the same level meaning they are real beginner books. If you are the type of person who doesn't know how to work a mouse, then I suggest that you stick to Dummy books. The Quickbooks are more geared towards people who like to play with programs to figure them out. They do give brief explanations of the basics, and I mean: "This is a pallet, this is a brush" but they only do it briefly. They are non-patronizing to the people out there who have a knack for figuring programs out. Quickbooks are also informative. If you need information on a specific topic, such as adjusting contrast, you'll usually find it within seconds through the glossary. Not only that, but there are a number of visual aids to reference and shows step-by-step what you're going to do or use. Sometimes, they even include URLs to pages on the web. The details are also worth their while to read. They give plenty of additional tips to use that you might not think of. It will usually be in a side box with a "did you know" kind of title. These have helped in my work plenty of times and given me ideas. Plus, these books are for Mac or PC which is a plus for me considering sometimes I have to work on one or the other platform and don't always know the keystrokes or commands which can be quite different from each other. Again, these are reference books. They are not tutorial books for the ultimate beginner. I continue to use these books with my work and enjoy them thoroughly. I recommend these books for people who like to play with programs and need something to look back on and research further.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful start
Review: I wanted to learn Fireworks quickly so I purchased this book. It was much more than expected. I didn't expect a beginners book or a quick start book to teach everything. But this book was succinct and to the point. I was able to get a grasp quickly and move on to a design type book which emphasized the creative aspects of Fireworks in more detatil. Hand in Hand with the Fireworks 4 f/x and Design book, I was able to increase my Fireworks skills tremendously. I'd highly recommend both books used in tandem if you are a beginner. There are plenty of tips and notes along the way as well as some Photoshop differences to ease the transition for Photoshop users. Since using Fireworks, I now want Photoshop to work the same way. For web graphics Fireworks rocks! But it did take a bit of time to realize the power of FW vectors and to stop thinking "Photoshop".
Rating:
Summary: It's all in the details!
Review: I've bought quite a few of these quickie books. Some are good. Some are awful. This one goes way beyond the others. It's all in the details. Details on how to save files. Details on how to slice objects. Details on how to create rollovers. Details on optimizing. Details on everything. I've been carrying my copy around so much that the cover is about to fall off.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Great
Review: Some aspects of this book frustrated me. While the instructions and the pictures are helpful, you need to know something about the Fireworks interface in order to follow the instructions. The author tells to you use a certain command, or to display a certain menu, but gives you no clue as to where to find it. I found myself spending a lot of time looking for sample files that I could use to follow the instructions in this book. A CD with sample files, or a Web site where you can download sample files would have made the book much easier to use.
Rating:
Summary: A perfect blend of beginner and advanced stuff
Review: The guy who usually does our Web graphics left the company abruptly. So suddenly I was the one in charge of the graphics. I had no idea where to start. Thank Goodness we had a copy of this book on the shelf above his computer. It didn't take me long to read through the chapter on Optimizing and then create all the GIF and JPEG files for our site. But then I discovered we needed to create some sliced images and arrange them in tables. Jumping over to the chapter on Slices I got that one done fairly quickly. I was even able to figure out how to integrate the HTML for those tables with our Dreamweaver layout. Not bad for someone who had no training in Web graphics the day before. By the end of the week I had also created some new buttons (chapter on Behaviors) for our site. I recommend this book for anyone who is just starting out in Web graphics. It is very clearly written with easy to follow step by step instructions. (It's also got a lot of background material on understanding the Web.)
Rating:
Summary: Jam-packed with info, techniques, help, and background
Review: This book goes far beyond the typical beginner books and is more like a total reference book. It covers all of Fireworks, from start to finish. I especially liked the background on symbols, automation, and scripts. This is far more than other beginner books cover. I've got this book sitting right next to me as a work. It covers everything I need. The color section is one of the best I've seen. In just 8 pages the author has given us a complete tutorial on Web graphics, colors and photographs. As good as books costing twice the price.
Rating: 
Summary: No worth it
Review: This is a great book on Fireworks 4, and it was perfect for a person like me who, when I started, could barely draw a circle on the canvas. Within a couple weeks, I was feathering photos, setting up animations, creating interesting shapes using masks and other Fireworks options, working with disjointed rollovers, among many other things. As such a book should, Cohen's starts with the basics and builds on the knowledge established in the first chapters. First, there is document setup and Fireworks' basic tools, then on to colors, path tools, fills, strokes, effects, and text. Before long, you've forgotten how incapable you were (or at least I was) just a few days earlier, and you're working with hotspots and slices and behaviors (a critical component of web sites these days). Among other strong points about the book is the fact that it covers material impossible to render exciting, but extremely important for the full utilization of Fireworks, like optimizing files, importing and exporting files, and Fireworks' automation functions. If there is a problem, it is that the book gets a little rushed in sections on behaviors and exporting, but this is not a serious problem; you just need to concentrate more on these difficult subjects, and to have an ability to experiment a little. And if I were to advise Cohen to expand these sections, I would be hard pressed to suggest where she could cut in other sections to keep the book under 500 pages, and still directed at the target market, which I assume is people like me, who have a decent basic knowledge of computers, but who knew basically nothing about web graphics at the start. With this book, Cohen hits the center of the target. Some other good things. It includes helpful "hints" in every section, hints that I grew so comfortable with that I got into the habit of skipping to those first before I returned to the beginning to start work on the new section. The quality of these "hints" suggests the author's wide experience in the web and web graphics. Also good was the fact that, in certain critical sections on fairly complicated subjects, for instance creating disjointed rollovers (p. 313), the author first briefly outlines all the steps in the process before going on to the details of each step. Sometimes the big picture is necessary before diving into how it all really works, and Cohen is sensitive to that. A fine book. Worth every penny, and more.
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