Customer Reviews

The GIF Animator's Guide

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Don't be seduced by the high quality of the printing of this book and its large glossy pages full of colour. It makes a great coffee table book but the content is typical of so many web oriented books - a great deal of padding and an approach which says, "Why use 1 word when I can use a dozen?" Chapter 2, pages 13 to 26, covers the useful content, which is a pretty poor percentage of the over 300 pages in the book.
Most of the book is devoted to explanations of how to use various drawing packages: Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop etc. If you have any of these packages the original manuals offer a much better source for how to use them. The text does not even orientate itself specifically to GIF creation when discussing the drawing packages. Indeed, these pages are purely descriptive rather than guiding you through how best to create an animation.
A web search on "How to create GIF animations" returns more useful information than you will find in this book. As an alternative, I would recommend "Effective Web Animation" by J. Scott Hamlin - covering Javascript and Flash in addition, Hamlin manages to devote over 140 pages to GIF Animation, providing much more in the way of technique and ideas.

The book and the CD look brand new to me, and the shipping was maybe a couple days longer than I had expected; but, I have no complaints, everthing was like advertised.

It's a helpful tool for making gif animation files.