53 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Better than nothing, but disappointing, January 5, 2006
This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guides) (Hardcover)
ImageMagick is an extremely powerful, free, command-line image editor that has been around a while and is the preferred tool of many for dynamically creating images for the web. However, like many open-source projects, ImageMagick's weakness has always been poor documentation.
So I was excited when I saw there was finally a guide to ImageMagick, and ordered the book hot off the presses.
I have to say, though, I'm disappointed.
I was hoping for a book with a good command reference, tips and tricks, sample uses, and that sort of thing. Instead, it is a very basic introduction to ImageMagick.
The book is very graphical in nature, with about 75% of virtually every page filled by an image, and only a little text. The images, while a little useful, are probably larger than they need to be, and almost seem to be filler making up for the lack of text. They are also all black and white images, which makes them in some cases useless (i.e. "Figure 6-29. Alcatraz with varying levels of hue" depicts 4 essentially identical images - without color, you can't tell that one has less hue than another). For a book of this price, I would expect color photos.
As a result, the book feels very sparse, with little information on each page.
The last few chapters, which show code examples of how to use ImageMagick in several popular programming languages, are more in line with the sort of practical examples I was expecting, although this section feels short.
So overall, a decent *introduction* to ImageMagick, but I think calling it "Definitive" is a bit undeserved. It is the only game in town though, since for some reason no one else has written a book on ImageMagick. If you have already used ImageMagick, this book is only marginally useful.
I'll have to keep hoping O'Reilly does one, and does it right.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing. Needs Color & more emphasis on Perl & APIs, January 18, 2006
This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guides) (Hardcover)
This was disappointing. The emphasis of the book is on the ImageMagick commandline tools rather than the APIs. There are a lot of photographs but they're all black and white. The before and after samples are worse than useless - they just take up space. It's probably not the Author's fault.
Apress (the publishers) should really have done this book properly and included glossy color pages where needed. As it stands, it's impossible to tell from looking at the before-and-after photos in the book, what most of the image operations are supposed to do. This is just cheap on the part of the publishers.
Stick to the online imagemagick tutorials and give this book a miss.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice Introduction To ImageMagick, June 7, 2006
This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Definitive Guides) (Hardcover)
'The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick' by Michael Still is a nice guide which covers an extremely powerful set of tools that is lacking in documentation. Note that I say the word 'nice' and not GREAT. I wanted this to be great, I truly did. I use ImageMagick on a nearly daily basis and while I thought I knew I knew the ins and outs of this application pretty well, I was hoping that I could get some more out of this book, the only one of its kind on the market that I knew of.
Problem #1 NO COLOR IMAGES!!!!
How can you have a guide that covers manipulating and using images and provide no color examples when there are tons of other books the get away from the 3 colors of white, black and grey?? I realize that this was a decision made by the higher ups at Apress and it's a bad, bad, bad decision
Problem #2 At just over 300 pages and with some images (again, black and white) and cover nearly and entire page in size, this guide is certainly not DEFINITIVE. If you want to make a definitive guide, you need to have more content, more content, more content. More like 'An Introduction to ImageMagick' would be the more appropriate title.
If you are new to ImageMagick and want to see what can be done, this is a handy guide but any power users won't get a lot out of this book. The examples are handy, but the decision to have no color photos really hurts this text even as an introduction to the technology. Apress, you want some advice for version 2??? Get out the Crayola box!!
**** RECOMMENDED
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
