Adobe(R) InDesign(R) 2.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

~ Adobe Creative Team (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you're looking for thorough, at-home training in any Adobe application, the Classroom in a Book series is a good choice. Slow, deliberate pacing is a hallmark of these well-written books. Readers work through a wide variety of projects using professional-quality graphics and fonts (supplied on a companion CD-ROM). Rather than the personal "avoid-the-mistakes-I-made" quality of many how-tos, the series employs a more serious tone befitting books that are recognized as part of the official Adobe certification training.

Readers begin with a Quick Tour tutorial that briefly covers all of the basics--working with tools and palettes, placing graphics and text. It's a great first dip in the water for those coming from QuarkXPress. From there, the lessons focus in more depth on specific areas: the work environment, setting up a new document with master pages, working with colors and gradients, importing and linking graphics, drawing with vectors, adjusting typography and editing text, creating tables, working with XML, exporting to PDF, color management, and much more. The lessons work best when followed sequentially; each includes many smaller tips that become helpful in later lessons. Sidebars feature handy information from the user's guide. (Although a trial version of the application does not come on the CD-ROM, it's available for download at Adobe.com.)

It's the Photoshop- and Illustrator-type features within InDesign that make it so much more fun to use than rival Quark. This book shows you how to do cool things with transparencies, blending modes, feathered edges, and drop shadows, a lot of which is new to version 2.0. There are also exercises that cover less wow-inducing (but just as time-saving) tools for creating indexes and making tables.

Frequent illustrations and screen shots help readers monitor their progress. Chapter summaries and review questions let beginners test their confidence in the material before moving on, and allow experienced users to skip material they already know.

The book has a few minor errors, a couple of which might just be platform related. Despite these, Adobe InDesign 2.0 Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn a powerful application that makes print design a breeze. --Angelynn Grant

From Library Journal

Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress's page layout competitor, can integrate with other Adobe applications such as Photoshop, Acrobat, and Illustrator. With new features like the ability to import directly transparent image files from other Adobe applications and XML support, version 2.0 has spawned several guides to its use; public libraries with older books should be sure to upgrade. Visual QuickStart's extensive screenshots, clear instructions, and valuable tips make it a winner. An appendix lists keyboard shortcuts for both Windows and Mac users, and step-by-step explanations help InDesign novices quickly accomplish common tasks. Classroom includes self-paced tutorials that lead beginning users through common projects. Along with the CD's lesson files, review questions and answers in each chapter make this a useful self-study resource. [See below for a review of a guide on QuarkXPress version 5.0.DEd.]
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press (April 13, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201787202
• ISBN-13: 978-0201787207
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #537,626 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Surprising Disappointment, February 25, 2003

By	"bostonheather" (Boston MA United States) - See all my reviews

My review of this book echoes those before me insofar as the typos are concerned. I am transitioning over to InDesign from Pagemaker and thank goodness I know Adobe products as well as I do. In the first 25 pages there are over 5 major errors that cost time. They misnumber their example pages (ie: see page 3 but the picture they show is actually of page 2) to telling you the wrong menu to select (Go to type>text wrap, when in reality the text wrap command is under window>text wrap) Since I have a good knowledge of Adobe, I can overcome this, but if you are not mostly familiar with adobe's interfaces through photoshop, pagemaker, etc, this IS NOT THE BOOK FOR YOU. I love a lot of the CIB books too, but this one is a miserable experience. Hope they get a new editor before they lose more readers. Plus, once you open the classwork CD you can't return the book. Don't make my mistake!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Passable for Some, February 23, 2003

By	Jason White (London, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a really big fan of the classroom in a book series, so I bought the book despite other reviewers warnings of errors in the book. I'll confirm that the book had errors, sometimes annoying ones. The technical mistakes divide the book's useful customer base in half. If you feel you have enough software/Adobe experience to recognize when the book is wrong, then I'd still recommend this book, as the format of CIAB is great. If you're newer to professional software, and think you'll be thrown into disarray when the book instructs you to do something that doesn't work - then this may not be a good purchase. I'm glad I bought the book, as I now know how to use InDesign.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars In Design Classroom in a Book errors, January 28, 2003

By A Customer

I am not a computer expert. I purchased InDesign Classroom in a book because I knew it would go step by step. Unfortunately there are fonts needed that are not on the disk (i.e. Adobe Garamond Pro, Graceless...?) Making a substitution does not always work. There are too many errors in the book. The biggest problem is trying to find an e-mail question site.