Adobe Creative Suite 2 All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies

I needed this. Before spending hundreds of dollars on software and classes to learn the software. Get this book! It really helps you learn what each Adobe product can do.

I bought this book to supplement the textbook I am using for a class in Adobe Illustrator. Personally I think this book should replace that confusing manual. Like mathematics textbooks, most software instructional materials make the same errors. They assume that the reader already has a foundational knowledge of the subject, they fail to describe techniques in a true step by step fashion, and they subtitute jargon for plain English. This volume, like so many in the Dummies series, does a good job of assuming that the reader is a raw beginner and meeting him/her at that level, leading them through the basic knowledge of the skill or topic in a laid-back, understandable way. This is especially helpful to those of us too old to have grown up with computers (I graduated high school in '84, just as the Apple 2E was coming out - what a machine! Dot Matrix term papers and endless games of "Pong")! Bravo to the authors and to the entire Dummies team. Highly recommended!

This book is billed by the publisher as being '6 Books In 1.' At 768 pages, it's a big book. As you might expect, inside it is broken down into six books, one each on: Adobe Creative Suite 2 Basics InDesign CS2 Illustrator CS2 Photoshop CS2 Acrobat 7.0 (What happened to the CS2), and GoLive CS2 As is common with the 'For Dummies' books, each of these independent books are in tutorial format. That is, they start with the installation and then do a series of 'do this', now 'do that,' commands. This is combined with a pretty good indexing system so that if you want to go back and look something up, you can. This makes the book useful as a reference later on. Five of these books I'd say are entirely adequate. Book IV, on Photoshop, I'd say is a bit weak. That 'book' is about the same length as the other books in this volume. But the Photoshop software is so much bigger, so much more complex that I think you only get your toes wet in this volume. My suggestion is that if you are going to use the whole Creative Suite 2 package that you get this book and then another one on Photoshop alone. And since I like the 'For Dummies' books, I'd probably get 'Photoshop CS2 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies' to go along with this book.