The Adobe Illustrator CS2 Wow! Book (WOW!)

List Price: $59.99 Discount Price: $25.00

Customer Reviews:

The only Illustrator book I'm willing to buy [Posted on 2007-08-14]
No offense to Mordy Golding, but this is the only book on Adobe Illustrator I've ever seen that is actually worth the amount of money you pay for it. It's not something I would recommend to a person with reading comprehension issues who'd never touched the pen tool in their lives, but if you learn well through unstructured independent study, it's pretty hard to beat Sharon's work. There aren't any epic tutorials that drag on for pages and pages, so you can either read it cover-to-cover or flip through it randomly until you see something that catches your eye with equal degrees of ease and the text will tell you everything you need to know about what you're looking at. In the very few instances where the words fall short (the section on knockout groups has always felt a little murky to me), the example files serve as ample gap-fillers, allowing you to drill down as deeply as you feel comfortable.

Not so great for beginners [Posted on 2007-10-11]
I bought this book because it had good ratings. I am a little disappointed.

As a newcomer, I expected a clear, clever, step-by-step tutorial. But it's more like a bunch of TIPS...as written in the (sub)title. It was not written by a single person and the global structure is not so harmonious.
But, If you have another tutorial/book to learn Illustrator, this book might be an useful "case study" book.

Why I didnt like it so much :
For each topic, you first have a few explanations, without screenshots (which makes explanations sort of vague) and then you have a big "excercise/case study" part where an artist shows some work and gives you a few hints to reproduce it (here, you must use the CD sold with the book, because the hints are too scarse to allow you to really reproduce it).
I didnt feel at ease with the way topics were splitted between "basics" and "advanced" sections, inducing redundant parts, and making the first "basics" part boring and the 2d hard to study.

Inside each section, I didnt find the order of the topics pedagogical. There's an explanation about this point, and then that point and no relationship between each point.

For people who are already using Illustrator, there might too much unuseful explanations on basics (like: what is a mouse? a cursor...etc). And since informations on a same kind of features are splitted around, it might be not so easy to use as a "Help" or "Dictionary" book.

best reference book for Illustrator [Posted on 2007-10-12]
Best book for learning the more "advanced" techniques of illustrator. It is definitely for the advanced student. However, this book can't be beat for learning the basics of the pen tool. The excercise, "Zen of the Pen" found on the CD was what finally helped me learn the pen tool and that alone was worth the price of the book.

Some techniques were way beyond me, but time will pass and I'll pick up the book again and focus on a new technique and "get it."

The one thing that really really bugs me, and I hope it has been "fixed" in the CS3 version, is that the one thing I want and need to learn will invariably be the one item that does not have an example on the CD!!

Another great book that reveals the unique way professionals use Illustrator is Toni Tolan's book, Best Practice, the Pros on Adobe Illustrator. I mentioned this here because it is impossible to find this book on Amazon just by typing the topic, "adobe illustrator" on the Amazon search engine.

Very good source of ideas [Posted on 2007-12-18]
This book is an excellent source of killer tips of how to improve skills in Illustrator. Good for everyone, who already knew this program, comfortable with its possibilities, but want to learn more about it. Good examples, easy-to-understand examples and followable tutorials.

WOW! [Posted on 2008-02-18]
If you do not have this book, get this book. It is as simple as that. This book is a MUST have. That's it. No ifs ands or buts. GET THIS BOOK!

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