[.ca] Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium All-in-One Desk ... (ISBN 0470117249)

Adobe CS3 Design Suite, a reference manual for Dummies! A critical review:
I've finally plunked down a few bills and bought the suite. The CS3 is phenomenal, by the way. My only problem is, is that with the exception of some older versions of Photoshop and a couple of projects with Illustrator, this suite is essentially a whole new program. After reading the reviews below, I decided to borrow this book from the library just to be sure it was worth the effort to buy. After a couple of weeks of going through various chapters, I bought the book from Amazon. Just to be sure, this is a book for beginners and moderate users of the CS3. There are two other books that I bought "How to Cheat in Flash CS3" and "WOW, The Adobe Illustrator CS3 book" because both offer step by step illustrated examples and on CD-rom. But neither offers an expansive explanation of the use of the tools as The Dummies version. And, we talking close to 100 pages on this subject alone. The Dummies is about 800 pages and is separated by each of the CS3 Design Suite programs. Also, authors Jennifer and Chris Smith, do a great job of interconnecting the different softwares. If theres a downside to this, it's this: the book is printed on stock paper barely heavier than newsprint. The cover creases very easily, everything within the cover pages is in b/w. This point does prove a bit disconcerting as your eyes tends to skip over the printed tables. If you had the tables in color, it would reinforce the lesson the authors were attempting to get across. And, last but not least, the Dummies collection does not come with a cd-rom. The Dummies for CS3 does what it sets out to do: provide reference material for those who have the CS3 Design suite. Period. And, it does it well. It is not flashy as the other books I just mentioned but to get started in learning about this terrific suite, this should be your first stop. And, for what it offers, it is a heck of a lot cheaper than taking a class.