Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat 5.0 Classroom in a Book [With CDROM] (Classroom in a Book (Adobe))

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

 

 

I just finished the last of the book's 14 lessons. I gave this book a four-star rating because some of the lessons keep using the same tools over-and-over again. It took me about 35 minutes to complete each lesson. If you follow all of the steps, you will have no trouble doing it on your own. Part of lesson 3, Adobe PageMaker is used only to save the exercise; but if you skip that part of the lesson, you still could continue to the end. On the whole, I think that all the lessons are easy to learn.

I'd never returned a book before, but this one certainly deserved the extra milage. The book plodded along (maybe because of the classroom approach), but what finally convinced me to return it was Page 290, "Creating eBooks". After ONE page of self-evident information, the very last paragraph says, "For more information on designing and creating eBooks, See How to Create Adobe PDF files for eBooks ... available online ......." The problem of course is that a book that lists for [money] should furnish the information. But what got the book its second pair of walking legs is that the referenced book isn't available... Probably doesn't exist at all. Pick another one. You can spend your money better.

After plodding through many chapters of this book, I am totally exasperated. Not only was the book fraught with errors, but the information was, at best, inadequate. I am an indexer and a Mac user. You cannot create an index in OS X and that is not documented in the book. It is apparent that the authors, Adobe staff, never tested the instructions for the lessons on OS X. in addition, there are too many "check online for information about xxxx" references. If i wanted the information online, I would not have purchased a book. The waste of money is small compared to the waste of my time. One star is definitely a high rating for this book.

I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Acrobat 5.0 and an Instructor. Acrobat one of the most versatile programs ever developed. AA5CIB has helpful exercises for essentially any use of the program. If you can not attend a course taught by someone that works extensively with the product, this is the next best way to learn the product.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Acrobat 5. The tutorials are very complete and although some commands are repeated throughout the lessons, this just reinforces what was learned earlier in the lessons.

Acrobat 5 is a great product, but Adobe has done a lousy job of communicating its many valuable features and how to use it. Totally unstructured and unintelligible, this book is an example of what happens when computer programmers attempt to communicate in English.

I recently participated in an Acrobat focus group made up of people who use the product in their daily work. Everyone agreed that it's very useful in a wide range of applications, but they all had real difficulties learning how to use it. This book only adds to the problem.

Let me just start by saying, that this book is great! I myself was a novice on Adobe Acrobat and mostly just used it to do simple pdf-conversion through distiller. Reading this book answered all of my questions that had build up through time. Along side I learned a lot of new stuff and cool tricks to do simple tasks in smarter ways.
The only weak spot, from my point of oppinion, is a weak chapter concerning colourmanagement and prepress, but I figure, that guys who really need that sort of info, wouldn't read this book. All in all a very good bye!

This was a great buy. I've learned a lot in just the 1st 70 pages. It paid for itself!