Teach Yourself Visually Ilife '04: The Fast and Easy Way to Learn

Michael and Dennis Cohen have done a great job in this book to help beginning to intermediate users with the iLife suite. I am often called upon to help friends with their Macs. When they have questions on the iLife programs, I find it much easier to refer them to this book than to try and talk them through the problem on the phone or via iChat. Thanks to the Cohens for making my iLife as a consultant a bit easier.

Apple has long said it makes computers for the rest of us, and now with its iLife suite of tools Apple appears to be making software for the rest of us as well. The Teach Yourself Visually series of computer books seems to follow the same philosophy, but where TYV's offerings for more complex programs like Photoshop serve as "scratch-the-surface" introductions, iLife '04 really does look deep under the surface of Apples' popular suite of tools. My favorite section, perhaps because I know the least about it, is on GarageBand, which is the most exciting piece of software I've seen in years.The Teach Yourself Visually books all benefit from strong integration of explanatory text with detailed graphics, but the text portion of this particular book benefits from clear, thorough, and often quite humorous writing. The author obviously knows the programs-more important, he knows how to communicate that knowledge to his readers (I believe he's the same Michael Cohen who writes the multimedia section of the famed Macintosh Bible). I highly recommend this title-for twenty bucks, it's a bargain.

Teach Yourself Visually iLife 04 is the perfect book for someone who wants simple, easy to follow instructions for using each of Apple's iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garage Band). What makes this book different from all the other iLife books are the clear step-by-step instructions, all accompanied by full color screen shots and illustrations, for using almost every iLife feature. The tips that accompany each task save time and effort in using the iLife programs and point out special features that aren't generally known. This is the book to get if you want to learn how to use iLife 04 without having to become a computer scientist, or read pages and pages of text. Get this and start using the software right away while you read.