Customer Reviews

Fireworks 4 for Windows & Macintosh (Visual QuickStart Guide)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a fan of the Visual Quickstart series, but Sandee Cohen is one of the best authors in the bunch.

This Fireworks 4 Visual Quickstart does exactly what it promises. Gets you up and running fast, with no long-winded paragraphs and loads and loads of pictures.

Everything in the program is shown in big, clean pictures with loads of labels. So it's very easy to follow along the step by step instructions. Start here. Click there. Tah-dah! You've done it.

The book is divided up into different workflows. So if you don't care about drawing, you can skip directly to the Optimizing chapters. There's even a special section for those who are moving over from Photoshop. So each tool and palette from Adobe is clearly labeled with its Macromedia counterpart.

One thing I particularly like is the background on not just Fireworks, but the Web in general. For instance, there's a whole section that explains when or if you should slice.

There's also a great color section that shows things like the difference between Gamma settings for the Windows and Macintosh computers. Also Web Dither fills, Banding, JPEG compression, and so on.

This is much more than a book on Fireworks. I recommend it for anyone who is just starting out creating Web graphics, and needs some solid background.

Oh yes, did I mention the book also covers Dreamweaver 4 and Flash? Turns out Fireworks 4 works well with those programs. So the book shows you how to import code into Dreamweaver and then edit the images back in Fireworks.

There are tons of little stories and anecdotes that made the book a joy to read. Even when I wasn't in front of the computer.

Fireworks is a tricky program.

It's a combination of Photoshop (which I know) and Illustrator (which I don't) as well as a little Flash (which I played with once). Needless to say, with all those programs kicking around together, learning Fireworks is not easy.

After several weeks struggling with the manual and some online tutorials, I gave up and bought this visual quickstart book. Am I glad I did.

It only took a few hours with this book to create my own sliced graphic that I exported out as a table and inserted into Dreamweaver. Then, the book showed me how I could work in Dreamweaver to edit the Fireworks table.

The book also had the clearest, most understandable steps to create the new pop-up menus and rollovers. This is something I always wanted to do, but never understood.

I can't think of any question I had that the book didn't answer. It's like the author was watching me work and saw what things I didn't understand.

If you've got Fireworks, you must keep this book on your desk.

This is my first book in the Visual Quickstart Guide series. I have read a lot of reviews about the VQS series and knew what to expect when I bought one: a very solid quick reference work.

This book delivered exactly that. I have used Fireworks before and was familiar with a number of its features. This book helped clarify some of them and taught me several new ones (the most useful of which is the creation of a navigtation bar). In that sense, it was more than a good purchase. The book is well-written, clear and concise, which is exactly what I needed.

Now a word of CAUTION: I am not sure how useful this book would be to me if I had no prior knowledge of Fireworks or other graphic design programs. I tend to like a more structured approach for the material that is completely new to me. Also, while some people can learn well from quick reference works like this, I find that knowing just how something works is not quite enough. I need to unerstand the underlying reasons (theory, if you will) to feel completely comfortable with my knowledge. For this reason, I am not sure that this book would be the best guide for absolute newcomers to graphic design (those already familiar with programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other similar products, should probably do fine). For those, I would recommend reading something a bit heavier, with a good amount of theoretical background (Bible or Mastering series come to mind, with Deke McClelland's Photoshop Bible as an example).

That said, for anyone who just wants a quick reference and a very quick start on Fireworks 4, Sandee Cohen book fits the (relatively small) bill--pardon the pun--perfectly.

This book goes far beyond the typical beginner books and is more like a total reference book.

It covers all of Fireworks, from start to finish. I especially liked the background on symbols, automation, and scripts. This is far more than other beginner books cover.

I've got this book sitting right next to me as a work. It covers everything I need.

The color section is one of the best I've seen. In just 8 pages the author has given us a complete tutorial on Web graphics, colors and photographs.

As good as books costing twice the price.

This is a great book on Fireworks 4, and it was perfect for a person like me who, when I started, could barely draw a circle on the canvas. Within a couple weeks, I was feathering photos, setting up animations, creating interesting shapes using masks and other Fireworks options, working with disjointed rollovers, among many other things.

As such a book should, Cohen's starts with the basics and builds on the knowledge established in the first chapters. First, there is document setup and Fireworks' basic tools, then on to colors, path tools, fills, strokes, effects, and text. Before long, you've forgotten how incapable you were (or at least I was) just a few days earlier, and you're working with hotspots and slices and behaviors (a critical component of web sites these days).

Among other strong points about the book is the fact that it covers material impossible to render exciting, but extremely important for the full utilization of Fireworks, like optimizing files, importing and exporting files, and Fireworks' automation functions.

If there is a problem, it is that the book gets a little rushed in sections on behaviors and exporting, but this is not a serious problem; you just need to concentrate more on these difficult subjects, and to have an ability to experiment a little. And if I were to advise Cohen to expand these sections, I would be hard pressed to suggest where she could cut in other sections to keep the book under 500 pages, and still directed at the target market, which I assume is people like me, who have a decent basic knowledge of computers, but who knew basically nothing about web graphics at the start. With this book, Cohen hits the center of the target.

Some other good things. It includes helpful "hints" in every section, hints that I grew so comfortable with that I got into the habit of skipping to those first before I returned to the beginning to start work on the new section. The quality of these "hints" suggests the author's wide experience in the web and web graphics.

Also good was the fact that, in certain critical sections on fairly complicated subjects, for instance creating disjointed rollovers (p. 313), the author first briefly outlines all the steps in the process before going on to the details of each step. Sometimes the big picture is necessary before diving into how it all really works, and Cohen is sensitive to that.

A fine book. Worth every penny, and more.

I wanted to learn Fireworks quickly so I purchased this book. It was much more than expected. I didn't expect a beginners book or a quick start book to teach everything. But this book was succinct and to the point. I was able to get a grasp quickly and move on to a design type book which emphasized the creative aspects of Fireworks in more detatil. Hand in Hand with the Fireworks 4 f/x and Design book, I was able to increase my Fireworks skills tremendously. I'd highly recommend both books used in tandem if you are a beginner.

There are plenty of tips and notes along the way as well as some Photoshop differences to ease the transition for Photoshop users. Since using Fireworks, I now want Photoshop to work the same way. For web graphics Fireworks rocks! But it did take a bit of time to realize the power of FW vectors and to stop thinking "Photoshop".

I expected a "beginner" book to just cover the basics. But this book went far beyond what I expected.
The author has all sorts of background stuff on using Web-safe colors (not that important), optimiziing GIFs (throw away extra colors), and slicing images (keep the number of slices down).
There are several sections on using Fireworks with Dreamweaver, Flash, and even Director.
This book went into more depth than some of the $$$ color books out there.
The book is great -- small enough that I can stuff it in my jacket pocket and take it with me to my freelance job. (Oh yeah, I got the book cause I used Photoshop at home but got a freelance job where they use only Fireworks. I just may switch now that I see how cool the program is.)

The guy who usually does our Web graphics left the company abruptly. So suddenly I was the one in charge of the graphics. I had no idea where to start.

Thank Goodness we had a copy of this book on the shelf above his computer.

It didn't take me long to read through the chapter on Optimizing and then create all the GIF and JPEG files for our site.

But then I discovered we needed to create some sliced images and arrange them in tables. Jumping over to the chapter on Slices I got that one done fairly quickly. I was even able to figure out how to integrate the HTML for those tables with our Dreamweaver layout.

Not bad for someone who had no training in Web graphics the day before.

By the end of the week I had also created some new buttons (chapter on Behaviors) for our site.

I recommend this book for anyone who is just starting out in Web graphics. It is very clearly written with easy to follow step by step instructions. (It's also got a lot of background material on understanding the Web.)

I've bought quite a few of these quickie books. Some are good. Some are awful.

This one goes way beyond the others. It's all in the details. Details on how to save files. Details on how to slice objects. Details on how to create rollovers. Details on optimizing. Details on everything.

I've been carrying my copy around so much that the cover is about to fall off.

I truly enjoy the Quickstart series of computer books. They're informative, detailed and the content is easy to find. In fact, their books were used as my textbooks in college and I liked them so much I continue to use them. But I won't say that these books aren't for a specific type of person. I will explain. If you've ever picked up a Whatever-for-Dummies book, or the Idiot's-Guide-for-something or any kind of Textbooks-for-Morons you either like them or hate them. Why? Because they all seem to be written at the same level meaning they are real beginner books. If you are the type of person who doesn't know how to work a mouse, then I suggest that you stick to Dummy books. The Quickbooks are more geared towards people who like to play with programs to figure them out. They do give brief explanations of the basics, and I mean: "This is a pallet, this is a brush" but they only do it briefly. They are non-patronizing to the people out there who have a knack for figuring programs out. Quickbooks are also informative. If you need information on a specific topic, such as adjusting contrast, you'll usually find it within seconds through the glossary. Not only that, but there are a number of visual aids to reference and shows step-by-step what you're going to do or use. Sometimes, they even include URLs to pages on the web. The details are also worth their while to read. They give plenty of additional tips to use that you might not think of. It will usually be in a side box with a "did you know" kind of title. These have helped in my work plenty of times and given me ideas. Plus, these books are for Mac or PC which is a plus for me considering sometimes I have to work on one or the other platform and don't always know the keystrokes or commands which can be quite different from each other. Again, these are reference books. They are not tutorial books for the ultimate beginner. I continue to use these books with my work and enjoy them thoroughly. I recommend these books for people who like to play with programs and need something to look back on and research further.