Adobe Acrobat 8 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

~ Adobe Creative Team (Author)
Key Phrases: combine files, combining files, print production, Choose File, Choose View, Creating Adobe (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

No Acrobat user can afford to miss a beat in his or her production and business task workflow--which makes mastering new versions of key tools like Acrobat a problem. Realizing that the users Acrobat 8 is designed for--creative professionals, business users, and technical and engineering professionals --aren't going to interrupt their work schedules to take a class in the software, Adobe has brought the classroom to them in this handy, comprehensive book. Through a series of self-paced lessons (each of which builds on the last and includes hands-on projects that the reader can create using the files on the CD-ROM), this guide acquaints users with all of Acrobat 8's regular and industrial-strength features for creating, reviewing, editing, commenting on, restructuring, and preflighting PDF files, as well as new features in Acrobat 8: securing private information with new redaction tools; creating dynamic and interactive forms; saving PDF files as Word documents; automatically archiving your Outlook emails to PDF; using newly enhanced reviewing and sharing options, and more. Professional tips and techniques are scattered throughout.

About the Author

The Adobe Creative Team of designers, writers, and editors has extensive, real world knowledge of Adobe products. They work closely with the Adobe product development teams and Adobe's Instructional Communications team to come up with creative, challenging, and visually appealing projects to help both new and experienced users get up to speed quickly on Adobe software products.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press (January 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321470850
• ISBN-13: 978-0321470850
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #208,623 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough reference, but not a tutorial, April 17, 2007

By	Allen Stenger (Alamogordo, NM USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Despite the title, this is a reference and not a tutorial. It shows how to perform various tasks with Acrobat, such as creating PDFs from common office applications, editing and combining existing PDFs, creating forms, and using some of the special features such as shared document reviews, digital signatures, and making documents viewable and accessible on a variety of devices.

The focus in on particular features of Acrobat. There is little discussion of workflows or the steps one might take end-to-end to create a PDF with desired properties. For example, everyone has seen PDFs with tables of contents and indexes that hyperlink to the specified page, but there's no mention of that in this book and you won't learn how to do it here. There are no troubleshooting tips (for example, what do I do if my images come out fuzzy?).

The treatment leaves Adobe Acrobat Distiller a mystery. From time to time there are instructions to go over to Distiller and change some Acrobat setting, but there's no overall explanation of why it works this way. A sidebar "What is Distiller?" would have been nice.

The book is packaged with a CD-ROM containing all the exercise materials and some tutorial videos. The videos, from lynda and from Total Training, cover most of the features new to Acrobat 8 and are very well done. The book itself is competent but uninspiring.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice complement to the software, March 23, 2007

By	A reviewer (Gainesville, Florida United States) - See all my reviews

If you need an introduction to the features, intuitive or obscure, in the Acrobat Professional 8 software, this is the book for you. I looked at other titles in the market but none comes close to this book in coverage and ease of use. Pity it doesn't come for free with the software.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Acrobat 8 Classroom In Book Great review, November 4, 2007

By	J. Harris (Cocoa, Fla) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Being that I haven't upgraded my own instruction on Acrobat since version 6, I found the Adobe Acrobat 8 Classroom In A Book a great review of a great application. Yet another great textbook from the long line of support from Adobe.