Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source ReviewA nice overview of the workflow of Macro/Adobe's well-entrenched, tightly integrated website creation suite; This collection of tutorials is both a good introduction and a decent update to the current versions of Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash, without going too deeply into any of those programs (which would be way too much for one book). It's well written, better explained than some books I've read on the subject, with some errors (par for the course with Training From the Source), but nothing too debilitating.
The first half of the book has you designing a site for an organic food provider, creating and optimizing images in Fireworks, incorporating those into Dreamweaver templates, creating page styles (a bit more complex than that would seem), linking pages together, adding interest and interaction in Flash, right up to the point of uploading to publish. With that under your belt, the second half gets more deeply into using Flash as a site creator, though still incorporating DW, delving more into database-driven sites with ColdFusion (not part of Studio 8 but downloadable from Macromedia in a developer's edition); incorporating onsite/offsite work groups with Contribute, and finally preparing the entire package for uploading to a domain. The book takes on the challenge of balancing both a comprehensive and basic real-world-type tour of Studio 8, and pulls it off nicely ..... though definitely allow time for breaks and review.
I found the sections on HTML and ActionScript a bit frustrating, and when a teaching book contains errors it's hard to tell if you're the one doing something wrong; with the current software versions there is no way around some coding and tag orientation, and now that CSS has become such a necessity, we can't expect this toolset to become anything intuitive for some time. Fortunately, with the aforementioned integration, it's at least easier to get a concept of how it all works together, and it's good to see more tutorials appearing that address the workflow of this dedicated web suite and giving us a basic start in just one book.
Again, one star off for proofing (sorry but when a book goes for $45 MSRP it needs to be perfect; MM Press needs beta testers), but better than most from this publisher.Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source Overview

Want to learn more information about Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations) ReviewThis is not a beginner's guide to Fireworks, nor is it an advanced reference. Instead, it is a selection of various topics about Fireworks. Early sections that present an overview of the various Fireworks bitmap and vector tools are rather straightforward, but with creative examples. Later sections, such as creating Flex skins and AIR applications are for more advanced users. The fact that the book has several authors is rather evident as you read the somewhat disjoint topics in each chapter.
However, even with this variability between the different chapters, there are plenty of "gems" hidden in this book. I've used Fireworks for many months, and I still didn't completely understand how some of the different tools worked until I saw some of the excellent examples in this book. One problem with Fireworks is that some very important features are often hidden within extensions in the Commands menu, or hidden in some far-off panel that needs to be enabled. This book helped me discover some of those hidden gems within Fireworks.
This is not intended to be a Fireworks reference book. But as a stroll through various features of Fireworks (especially those features that make it unique compared to Photoshop or Illustrator), it was a pleasant journey. Reading this book while Fireworks is open so you can try some of the interesting examples will help you better appreciate the features that the authors are trying to highlight. If you just read the book without trying the examples, you will be missing much of the fun.
One downside with this book is that the various images were obviously intended to be published in color, but they are only in black-and-white in this book. If you look at the sample images at the top of the back cover, you can see how some of the images were intended to be shown. By printing these images in black-and-white, many of the examples loose a lot of their value. Another reason to be trying the examples within Fireworks yourself to see how they really look. If the images had been printed in color, I probably would have rated this a 4 instead of a 3.Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations) Overview

Want to learn more information about Foundation Fireworks CS4 (Foundations)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques ReviewAdobe Fireworks is a pretty underrated app, and I just recently discovered it myself. Looking around online I found very little resources to tell me just what the heck this thing does. Even Adobe's website if missing the usual gloat about features.
I picked up this book to get a nice overview of what this program is capable of, and in that respect it delivers quite nicely. This is not a comprehensive guide, but, you should know that just by the title. The book is well written, and delivers just enough content where it counts.
I do wish that the chapter on 'Designing Interfaces' was a bit more in depth, but all in all I think the material is pretty well rounded, and definitely worth the $20 I spent.Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques Overview

Want to learn more information about Adobe Fireworks CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...