Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3 (Real World)

List Price: $44.99 Discount Price: $25.00

Customer Reviews:

Where's Deke? [Posted on 2008-01-15]
This volume is a great disappointment. I'm sure Mordy could answer my questions but the book sure doesn't.
Deke McClelland's version (Real World Illustrator 10) is a far more thorough book. If you're a novice this book is
ample. I'm looking for more detail and it's just not here.

Clueless About Web Design [Posted on 2008-01-18]
I can only comment on the Web and Mobile Design chapter as that's all I read (put the book down after that!). It's as if the explanation of web safe color palettes and dithering were lifted right out of 1998. In fact I double-checked the cover to make sure it was for CS3! I'm a professional web developer, and let me tell you, for the most part you don't have to worry about the "216 web safe colors". My jaw is still stuck open...

Great, info-stocked book! [Posted on 2008-03-12]
Great book. Very insightful explanations.... it's very obvious that
the author is master of the subject. This book has been a great resource in my Illustrator class; it's also the assigned textbook. Highly recommended!

The best out there [Posted on 2008-04-08]
Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3 (Real World) All too often, when trying wrap your mind around a particular piece of software, the guru who writes the how-to book tries to dazzle you with a whole lot of extraneous, "dig me!", "look what I can do!" "I am so clever!" "watch me pull a flaming monkey out of my butt!", nonsense, when all you want to do is learn how to use a certain tool. Mordy's not like that. His book makes Illustrator way easy to learn. I'll give you an example. In all the books I've bought over at least a decade to learn several applications, I've always had to "hack my way through the underbrush", in the effort to discover and highlight key points. In Mordy's book, I haven't underlined anything, 'cause it's all concise, with no added fluff. When I need to look up something, I grab Mordy's book, go right to the correct page, scan down the instructions, bang, bang, bang, got it, toss the book aside, back to the computer, and I'm there. Seldom have to pick up the book a second time to look up the same thing again. It's easy to remember because I didn't have to wade through numerous digressions into obtuseness. A friend purchased an Illustrator book by another author and she has a couple pages of diagrams on the correct finger placement on certain combinations of keys. "Finger-dances", she calls them. If I was in a class this person taught, I'd run screaming out into the hallway. Come on, I'm not learning to play the piano here or how to read Braille. Don't make things more difficult than they have to be. By now I know how to find the Control, Shift and Alt keys. I can even find the Spacebar. (Whoa! Hold me back!) And don't waste expensive pages showing me other people's work. I can buy a big stack of magazines at a garage sale for a couple bucks if I want to look at other artists stuff. Okay, rant over. If you want to learn Illustrator pretty easy buy Mordy's book. That's all you need.

Not "industrial strength" -- an ok book for people who want to expand a limited repertoire. [Posted on 2008-06-19]
As a relatively new Illustrator user I purchased this book because it covered a broad range of topics, and seemed to have extra detail on features that were of particular interest (e.g., graphs, clipping masks). I am somewhat disappointed so far. The introduction is short -- not enough to even learn where all the tools are located -- yet the topics do not provide enough depth to master the topics. There aren't many pictures (and only 16 color pages), so when the book says "Use the Direct Selection Tool" for the first time without a picture, a novice needs to turn back 3 pages to remind themselves what that is. (An expert obviously already knows what this is and has no use for this section at all.) So this seems to be a book for people who have some familiarity with Illustrator but not enough that they will tire of only 3-4 pages per topic.

A major pro to the book, however, is that the topics are very accessible. I am getting a good introduction to a variety of topics, and learning the lingo enough to be able to Google for more information when necessary. Many of the Adobe programs are difficult to break into, and this book does make that possible for Illustrator.

Although this book was not what I expected from the cover descriptions, it is serving an alternate purpose.

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