Adobe Illustrator CS Classroom in a Book

Author: Adobe Creative Team List Price: $45.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0321193806 Publisher: Adobe Press (13 October, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 2,482 Average Customer Rating: 4.75 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

This book, like many other Classroom in a Book texts, provides step-by-step instructions on how to do some of Illustrator's most popular and useful commands. Users of Photoshop will notice lots of similarities in the interface and tools, yet there are differences between commands that do the same thing (such as Ctrl+D to deselect in Photoshop, and Ctrl+Shift+A to deselect in Illustrator).

The Illustrator book in particular, however, was full of typographical errors that seemed rather embarrassing for being an official Adobe training book. While I understand the importance of being on bookshelves in a timely manner, taking a few extra days to properly proof their text would be appreciated by this particular user. This is especially true when considering the book's price, and the fact that the book is black and white, except for a small color section. The paper and type, however, are excellent, and the binding is flexible, while being strong at the same time.

I found this book to be a lot more in-depth than the Photoshop CS Classroom in a Book, as this text went on to describe the steps in clearer detail. It offers clear explanations for many of the choices that the user is instructed to make, while also focusing more time on the interesting exercises, as opposed to tasks that are rather redundant between any other similar application.

It will take the user approximately forty-five minutes to an hour and a half to complete each of the 19 lessons, making the book's completion time about one week.

Some of the book's later chapters deal with Illustrator-Photoshop workflows, so having Photoshop in addition to Illustrator is recommended. The book questionably refers the user to use the outdated Photoshop version 6 later in the book, leading me to believe that the author failed to update the text to the current version. Also be aware that some naming conventions do not match up with the application 100%. They are close, but I found it odd that many of these were not cross-checked for exact matches.

All in all, after completing this book, I am ready to move on to more specialized books on Illustrator, and look forward to implementing what I've learned to create streamlined work pipelines between this, Photoshop, and other graphic/layout programs.

The book is organized and laid out to be used as a textbook/workbook for a class. But, if you don't have the time or money to take a class, you can work through this book yourself.

All materials and files for the lessons in the book are included on the CD (except, of course, for the application itself). You'll need to copy all the files from the CD to your hard drive and work with them from there, in order to make the changes to them as you work through the lessons.

Before you get to Lesson 1, there is "A Quick Tour of Adobe Illustrator," an interactive demo that gives you an overview of the key features of Illustrator cs. You actually use one of the art files on the CD and follow along with the book to try some features. The book says it takes about an hour.

This books will help you discover that even though Illustrator keeps adding more features, it is actually easier to use than it used to be. There are lessons on drawing with the pen tool, painting, working with type, working with brushes and scribbles, using the airbrush features, transforming objects, using the 3-D Effect (!), printing artwork and color separations, and combining Illustrator graphics with Photoshop images, and more.

Every lesson begins with a list of what you'll learn in the lesson, exactly which files from the CD you'll need to use and how to set up the document(s) you'll use in the lesson. From there, it has very clear lessons. You'll definitely learn how to use Illustrator if you follow this book.

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