Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

~ Adobe Creative Team (Author)
Key Phrases: text wrap, object styles, body copy, Choose File, Using the Type, Choose Edit (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe InDesign CS4

Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning page layout with Adobe InDesign and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. Explore typography and color, and learn more about creating tables and using styles. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Create layouts for magazines, newsletters, and brochures. Learn how to make Adobe PDF files and rich interactive documents. Prepare files for high-resolution printing and the Web.

“Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn hands-on with real-world examples. You'll gain exposure to good print design as well as efficient workflow techniques.” —Michael Witherell, Adobe Certified Expert, Publishing, Training, and Consulting

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press; 1 Pap/Cdr edition (November 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321573803
• ISBN-13: 978-0321573803
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,360 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Errors in Most Lessons, October 18, 2009

By	Holly Murphy (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

My school uses this as a textbook. When we go through our homework in class, we would bring up the problems we had in the exercises. Week after week, we would discover errors in almost all the lessons, and how the results differ than those specified in the book. It just made the learning progress very confusing and frustrating. For me, this book was not useful at all.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth the price by any stretch, December 25, 2008

By	T. McCluskey - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm up to lesson 3 in this "training workbook", and I'm thoroughly unimpressed so far. The exercises contain no explanation whatsoever, so that all you end up doing is following the steps that someone used to design a project. What's more, at least twice (in three lessons) the steps have not worked produced the result they were supposed to: In one case, the text fields somehow ended up on the background layer, resulting in either text obscured by marginalia or graphics obscured by text; in the other, placing text into a text box made an image on the same page vanish.

In addition to these issue, throughout the book there have been areas of very unclear explanation or areas that are just plain wrong: One step instructs you to select the Semibold group for Adobe Garamond Pro, despite there being no semibold option for this font; another step instructs you to shift-click to select two different items when it should be an instruction to ctrl-click, as shift-clicking selects a half-dozen items. This is by no means an exhaustive list of errors I've encountered in the book, just a sampling--and again, I'm halfway through lesson 3 of 14.

Between the outright errors and the lack of any explanation, I would strongly advise anyone wanting to learn InDesign CS4 to go find a different book--this one is certainly not worth the ridiculously high price tag.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A frustrating waste of time, November 4, 2009

By	J. Reavey Jr. (Drexel Hill, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Using this book for school, as assigned by my prof.

Most of the lessons have unclear explanations or outright errors that make them impossible to complete as instructed. It's incredibly frustrating, and completely inexcusable, since Adobe makes the software and publishes the book.

I might give it a pass if I actually felt like I was learning something instead of following a list of instructions. But I don't feel any more knowledgable in InDesign than when I started the book, and I'm on Lesson 10 of 14. That's quite depressing.

I would recommend any Graphic Design professors avoid assigning this book. You are doing your students a huge disservice.