Customer Reviews

Pagemaker 6.5 Complete

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This book is not for the user without experience. This guide tells you what everything does but does not tell you how to execute it. This is simply for the user with experience and wants to learn the advanced functions. I'm not saying this is a bad book but it's not good for people like me who does not have a clue to make it run. This book is largely dedicated for the steps after pagemaker such as prepress, explanation of colors (and why it doesn't match the monitors output), printing services, service bureaus. This book is good for wanting to know what to do after the project has completed the pagemaker stage.

I found this book very diffucult to follow. The steps are either incomplete, inaccurate, or improperly explained. Sometimes I couldn't figure out how to perform a particular pagemaker function, or I didn't understand why certain steps worked out the way they did. I have a fair amount of computer experience, and even a fair amount of pagemaker experience, but after reading through the first 4 chapters, I couldn't help but feel that this book was just put out to make money on the popularity of pagemaker and not better explain it. I wouldn't recommend this to users of any level. Pagemaker Adobe Classroom in a book is an excellent book for newcomers to the program. As for an good advanced pagemaker book, this isn't it.

There is a lot of text in this book, but that is as close to compliment as I'll give this book. Someone who has never used a computer before may find this book useful for the first hundred pages, and then will likely, like I did, become very frustrated with slow pace, and constant repetition of the basics. There was no need for this book to be 900 pages. Pagemaker, including all of its advanced features, could have been explained in far more detail in far less space. Reading through this book is a waste of energy, I'm sure some of the other pagemaker books out there are better than this one.

This book reminds me of when I was in highschool and I had to write a big essay and left it for the night before it was do. I would still write it but I would have to fudge it to fill the word count quota. Thats what I hope Shamms did, because if he actually did put effort into this book, well thats just sad.