Product Description

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe InDesign CS4

Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning page layout with Adobe InDesign and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. Explore typography and color, and learn more about creating tables and using styles. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Create layouts for magazines, newsletters, and brochures. Learn how to make Adobe PDF files and rich interactive documents. Prepare files for high-resolution printing and the Web.

“Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn hands-on with real-world examples. You'll gain exposure to good print design as well as efficient workflow techniques.” —Michael Witherell, Adobe Certified Expert, Publishing, Training, and Consulting

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13317 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From the Back Cover
The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe InDesign CS4

Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning page layout with Adobe InDesign and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. Explore typography and color, and learn more about creating tables and using styles. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Create layouts for magazines, newsletters, and brochures. Learn how to make Adobe PDF files and rich interactive documents. Prepare files for high-resolution printing and the Web.

“Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn hands-on with real-world examples. You'll gain exposure to good print design as well as efficient workflow techniques.” —Michael Witherell, Adobe Certified Expert, Publishing, Training, and Consulting

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
I've worked through a number of the "Adobe Classroom in a Book" series and usually found them authoratative and informative. Not this one! I started to work from chapter two. Within minutes, InDesign rejected one of the work files on the CD which comes with the book because it was made with a pre-release version of the software. Before reaching the end of the chapter I found two completely wrong instructions in the text. If I wasn't familar with InDesign CS2 I would be completely confused. As it is, I'm just very upset that I paid so much money for such a sloppy piece of work. Appealing to the publisher for updated working files to download, I'm told that they don't have any plans for them.

Excellent especially for new users of InDesign
In order to prevent potential users of this book from being put off by the only other reviewer who gave this book just 1*, I feel I should make the following early observations (although I'm only on chapter 3):

In lesson 2 (p31), you are shown how the Metadata panel in Adobe Bridge can be used to view information about the document, including which version of InDesign was used to create that document. This indicated that the lesson's work file on the CD-ROM was made with version 6 of InDesign, which is CS4. So I didn't suffer the other reviewer's file rejection problem.

I'm not sure which were the `two completely wrong instructions in the text' that upset the other reviewer. What I did find was that in the section in lesson 2 (p33) on using Preflight (the handy utility that monitors your work for potential problems later on), you need to examine the completed work file on the CD, not the start file (which you are working on at that time) in order to spot the errors mentioned in the text. In addition, the text states there are 33 errors when Preflight indicates there are 40. After this, everything seems fine so far.

So why am I giving 5* when I'm only on page 61 (of 406)?

I have previously worked through the InDesign CS2 Classroom in a Book (CIB) on which this CS4 book is based and updated with, thankfully, new work files and a new lesson on `creating rich interactive documents'. This covers (so the Index tells me) adding buttons, page transitions, and hyperlinks, as well as exporting as Adobe PDF or Flash, and converting a print document for online use.

When I was working through the InDesign CS2 CIB I had never used InDesign before. I thought at the time how well written the book was as an instruction manual and really appreciated the real-world examples it used during the lessons.
I've bought many a book and magazine on the strength that it was going to help me achieve something I was having a problem with - frequently only to end up disappointed for some reason. However, whilst reading the CS2 CIB I was able to put the instruction into immediate use as I went along to create a multipage house sale brochure. Stealing layout and formatting ideas from the CIB and using the templates built into Indesign, impressive, professional-looking results came fairly easily. However, I found it helps to know exactly what you wish to write beforehand and then import the text as Word files.


If you're new to InDesign, I'd thoroughly recommend reading the book from the beginning and doing every exercise, or at least from lesson 3 where you create a document from scratch. The CD contains all the files you need. Each chapter is self contained so you could jump around to non-consecutive chapters to read whatever topics are of particular interest to you. This would be useful if you hadn't used the software for a while and needed to brush up on certain areas.

The instruction is thorough without being pedantic, to the point without taking you through mind-numbing menu options, and, as I've already mentioned, the work examples are actually useful, not academic. I voted with my wallet - but then I am a fan of the CIB series.

CS4 work books - Amateur to designer
I work in marketing and had dabbled with most of the CS4 suite, however i never felt that i was utilising much of the potential and was considering working towards becoming a professional designer.

this work books have opend my eyes to some of the possibilities of the software and have increased my confidence and ability to the point where i am now teaching others in the office.

i throughly recomend these books as a stepping stone into design or as a way of improving your understanding and utilisiation of the software.

from these you can then progress to the 'Real world' books from Adobe.