Web Tricks and Techniques: Photo Manipulation: Fast Solutions for Hands-On Web Design

Pros: good intro material, beautiful printing and graphic design which for once may have an actual value given the topic. (I read the hardcover.) It does a good job of concentrating on the most important features. After working through this book you will be prepared to read the real help because you will understand the foundation of the more complex ops. It's spare, a welcome change from the verbosity of some misguided tutorials. Cons: there are a couple of now-useless chapters seeing as how Adobe has discontinued ImageReady. It discusses a slightly dated (7) version of PS. (Now at 10, "CS3".) Occasionally a sequence is about impossible to recreate without also reading the current PS help carefully. For a beginner's text, it occasionally will refer vaguely to an operation that is easy, but is not obvious.