Customer Reviews

Accelerated QuarkXPress 6, Skills and Drills

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This step-by-step guidebook and CD-Rom is a wonderful tutorial on learning the applications with QuarkXPress 6. First, let me say, that I am not a designer, nor am I very creative, but this book and CD have taught me more than any class or other book could. I have been frustrated with QuarkXPress for months now, I even stopped using it, now I am back to creating my own catalogs and promotional materials.

The book is easy to understand and the pictures and snapshots of the computer screen make a wonderful addition. You get Student Activities and Confidence Checks that really help your knowledge and speed within a short time. There are 20 Modules and Keyboard Shortcuts for both PC and Mac. I recommend this book to students, professors and business people who need QuarkXPress in their everyday life.

I can now save hours with all of my design work, Thanks Mr. Siegel!

Having just finished this fine workbook, I can give it two thumbs way up. This is quite possibly the best step by step book I have ever used. It is as easy to follow as it is complete. I learned important features such as style sheets, long documents and cmyk color. And the section on master pages made a difficult concept for me to grasp very easy. Top of bunch book!

By the way, having read a previous review about this book I almost didn't buy it. Check this out: the reviewer complains that there are typos in the book. Some of the typos are actually words we learn to correct during spell check. The words are "misspelled" in the book intentionally to call attention to the misspelled word. I wonder if the reviewer even read the book. Come on, dude!!!!

I was effectively a complete beginner to QuarkXPress, so I wanted a book that I could work through that would teach me its main functions. And this book (ISBN 1891762923) was really the only one I could find. So I got it and worked through it from beginning to end. It covers both Windows and Mac versions.

It is definitely for novices. Anyone who can use a word processor, even just the basic functions, would be easily able to follow and complete this book. But it doesn't take you very far. Even at the end of this book you're still not going to be anywhere near an expert in Quark. Overall I would say that it is just too easy. The author really "holds your hand" the whole way. A lot of space is taken up with trivial instructions like "Save your work." So you just follow simple instructions, and never really have to use your brain or commit anything to memory. On the other hand, you do get to see plenty of the features, and I suppose you do basically become able to produce work in Quark.

This book is only semi-professionally produced. The author is also the founder and president of the publishing company, which is fine, but it probably contributes to the fact that the book is not very "beautiful". The cover seems to be designed to be used for lots of different books: it just has a rectangular hole through which you can see the title on the first page. (I didn't get the colorful cover pictured above.) I found 17 minor errors, and I wasn't looking for them. But none of these things are necessarily fatal, and they might not matter to many people.

I'm certainly better at Quark now then when I started this book. But I just feel that I should be even better. Maybe that can only come with actually using it and doing your own projects.


(For anyone who is interested, here are the mistakes I found:
p29: change "[alt] [command] [up arrow]" to "[shift] [command] [up arrow]", and change "[alt] [command] [down arrow]" to "[shift] [command] [down arrow]"
p43: in the image in the middle of the page, the ring should be around 0.25"
p45: change "(but a check in the box)" to "(put a check in the box)"
p63: change "Jump the text" to "Link the text"
p68: change the heading "Set Tabs Stops" to "Set Tab Stops"
p80: change "Fix Box to Picture" to "Fix Picture to Box"
p93: change the heading "Space Align" to "Space/Align"
p96: change "Open mergeme" to "Open MergeMe"
p97: change "Open stackme" to "Open StackMe"
p103: change "Arial Verdana" to "Arial or Verdana"
p117: change "Holiday" to "holiday"
p145: change "easily add automatic page number" to "easily add automatic page numbers"
p153: change "[[8]" to "[8]"
p178: change "Quark version 4.1uses" to "Quark version 4.1 uses"
p249: change "close all of open chapters" to "close all of the open chapters"
p291: in the Duplicate Layout dialog, change "Tour Web Site" to "Tours Web Site"
p300: change "Ensure you are QuarkXPress" to "Ensure you are in QuarkXPress")


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Edited to add:
Above, DasReviewer wrote this paragraph:
By the way, having read a previous review about this book I almost didn't buy it. Check this out: the reviewer complains that there are typos in the book. Some of the typos are actually words we learn to correct during spell check. The words are "misspelled" in the book intentionally to call attention to the misspelled word. I wonder if the reviewer even read the book. Come on, dude!!!!

Assuming that this is about a review on amazon, and given that there are only two previous reviews and the other one is wholly positive, this must refer to my review above.

Actually, none of the mistakes I listed were deliberate misspellings to call attention to the misspelled words. In fact, none of them were even spelling mistakes. And of course I read the book. Otherwise I would hardly have been able to make such detailed comments. Not to mention that I explicitly wrote that I "worked through it from beginning to end."