Customer Reviews

Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Nowadays, if you hear about page layout, it often refers to webpages. But this book is [mostly] about hardcopy page design. InDesign is a powerful and generally easy to use program that lets you make sophisticated and professional looking pages. The book has many example images, usually in colour, which helps to emphasise the vivid richness of the output. There are many ways within InDesign to emplace text on a page. The text can be short headlines, or entire paragraphs. The font sizes, families and colours can be varied. So too with the orientation of the text.

Images and backgrounds can be readily added using layers. The latter is a key unifying idea across many Adobe products.

Also, the book is more than just an exhaustive listing of InDesign tools. You can certainly treat it as such. But it also has guidelines about what constitutes good layout. Like avoiding a cluttered or jarring look. To this ends, if you have a copy of the book, step backward [so to speak] and take a second look at a typical page. Instead of focusing on the context of the text, study the entire page layout. Often, there is plenty of white space or margin. When images appear, look at the integration of these with the accompanying text. I don't know if InDesign was used for the book itself, though you'd imagine it would be. But even if it wasn't, deconstructing the book pages offers many examples of good layout.

A possible irony here. Some readers will focus on the text and images, but miss what is literally in front of them, in terms of example layout. So don't you do this.

If you do already know HTML, then you'll note one big contrast in this book. Positioning of things on an HTML page consists of suggestions to the browser showing the page. Different browsers can and often do yield different images of the same page. InDesign is about absolute positioning. No viewer ambiguities.

I thought it would be helpful to warn other customers that if you buy the Kindle edition of an Adobe Classroom in a Book which deals with software versions older than CS5 (the current version at the time of this review), you may not be able to obtain the project files that are supposed to come with the book. I discovered this when I bought the CS4 Flash book and one of my co-workers told me he had the same problem with other CS4 Kindle editions (we still use CS4 versions of some Adobe products where we work). After some searching online, it appears there's no way to obtain the older project files without buying the paper edition (which comes with the files on a CD). CS5 Kindle editions do contain links to downloadable project files, but the older books appear to have their links stripped out, which probably means the project files for those versions have been removed from the publisher's server. It's likely that at least some of the CS5 project files are different enough that they won't be useful to users of the CS4 or CS3 books. I haven't checked all of the CS4 and CS3 books out personally, but I'm posting this warning so that other buyers will be aware of the risk.

Since my Beginning InDesign class requires this book, I bought it used. I feel very lucky that my used book came in a prime "as good as new" condition with its CD case unopened.

Just in a matter of 6 weeks, this book, along with its exercises on the CD, has taught me so much that I can't imagine taking this course without it. The subject matters are very well-organized and thoroughly covered, and easy to digest. At the end of each lesson, you get many helpful hints and tips to make the lesson really stick. Hands-on exercises on the CD are very practical, and really fun to do.

Yes, there are some errors in it, but not serious enough to hinder you from learning this incredible application. To me, this book is more than well worth its price, and a real keeper. I have another InDesign text book that I use from time to time, but this book is my major learning tool at this point.

It would be great if a textbook on intermediate to advanced InDesign is offered by the same team.

Very good condition, great for begginers. Lessons are an excelent tool for someone that needs to learn the basic stuff to work with this program.

Great Book! it taught me Indesign and saved my butt during my internship. Even if you have a different version of Indesign it can still be helpful. Plus it arrived very fast and in great condition.

If you want to learn about Adobe products, who better to learn it from than the folks from Adobe? Nobody knows Adobe products better than Adobe, I don't care HOW many books there are on the subject.

I have never taken a formal class in computerized design or print graphics. I taught myself Photoshop using Classroom in a Book a few years ago. And from that alone, I got a great job as a lead designer. So I can't say enough about these books.

Recently I decided it was time to focus on Illustrator and InDesign, so I bought the C.I.B. books for those programs in the current version that I'm using, which is CS4. I've just started studying them, but I already feel SO much more comfortable with those programs, and I've learned a TON.

Honestly, I cannot say enough about these books. They each come with a CD of lessons. The chapters are divided into each separate tool, so that you can really understand everything about the program. And it's all done in an easy to understand way. You can study the chapters in order, or as you need them. The books do not assume that you already know something about the programs, although the chapters do go in sequence, so they would presume that you know the data from the previous chapters if you skip around. Even veteran designers who already use the programs can learn a lot, as Adobe programs are quite robust and you could use them for years without even realizing that you're only using about 1/50th of the tools.

Just buy it. You won't be sorry. As a note, I strongly suggest you study it in FRONT of your computer and go through each action as you study.

You get the gist of InDesign, but the lessons are slow, repetitive and poorly explained. A good book if you want the basics, but not for people who want to learn the bells and whistles.