Jennifer Smith is the founder and Vice President of American Graphics Institute (AGITraining.com). She has authored multiple books on Adobe products and is a technical writer for the Adobe Classroom in a Book series. Jennifer has worked in all aspects of graphic design and production including as an art director of an advertising agency. More than ten years ago, Jennifer took her experience and applied it to teaching. Under her leadership, AGI has grown into the largest training organization focused on print, Internet, video, and PDF publishing. Her teaching and writing style shows a clear direction that can only be achieved by someone who knows the industry and has experienced the Adobe applications in a professional workflow. She lives in the Boston area with her husband (who co-authored this book) and children. Christopher Smith is President of American Graphics Institute and oversees curriculum content and delivery for Adobe’s largest and oldest Certified Training Provider. An Adobe Certified Expert, he works as part of the Adobe Creative Team as the lead technical writer for the Adobe Classroom in a Book series for both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe InDesign. His more than ten other books include Moving to InDesign, Teach Yourself Adobe Acrobat in 24 Hours, and Real World Adobe Acrobat. Smith has served as an elected member of the School Board in his hometown in suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and children.

6 books in 1—your key to success with CS2!

Your one?stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools

They all work together, and now you have one guide to help you work with each of them! First, you?ll get the "big picture" tour of the suite. Then you?ll be ready to create perfect pages with InDesign, illustrate them with Illustrator, add images you?ve edited with Photoshop, make PDFs with Acrobat, and design dynamite Web sites with GoLive.

Discover how to

• Use common menus, palettes, and plug?ins
• Design Web pages and print publications
• Create illustrations and add type
• Retouch, enhance, and reshape photos
• Save Photoshop images for print or the Web

Jennifer Smith is the founder and Vice President of American Graphics Institute (AGITraining.com). She has authored multiple books on Adobe products and is a technical writer for the Adobe Classroom in a Book series. Jennifer has worked in all aspects of graphic design and production including as an art director of an advertising agency. More than ten years ago, Jennifer took her experience and applied it to teaching. Under her leadership, AGI has grown into the largest training organization focused on print, Internet, video, and PDF publishing. Her teaching and writing style shows a clear direction that can only be achieved by someone who knows the industry and has experienced the Adobe applications in a professional workflow. She lives in the Boston area with her husband (who co?authored this book) and children.

Christopher Smith is President of American Graphics Institute and oversees curriculum content and delivery for Adobe?s largest and oldest Certified Training Provider. An Adobe Certified Expert, he works as part of the Adobe Creative Team as the lead technical writer for the Adobe Classroom in a Book series for both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe InDesign. His more than ten other books include Moving to InDesign, Teach Yourself Adobe Acrobat in 24 Hours, and Real World Adobe Acrobat. Smith has served as an elected member of the School Board in his hometown in suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and children.

Adobe software has always been highly respected for creative design and development. Its programs allow you to produce amazing designs and creations with ease, and with the release of the Adobe Creative Suite 2, you can design a wide range of productions ranging from illustrations and Web sites to professional documents and photographic manipulations.

Adobe Creative Suite 2 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies is your one-stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools. Written in a thorough, fun way to show you the basics on how to use each of the programs, you’ll find out just how easy it is to start designing brilliant images and graphics. This guide gives you the tools you need to:

• Draw with InDesign
• Understand page layout and color
• Create colorful images with Illustrator C2
• Use the pen tool, type, and image placing
• Choose the correct Photoshop mode for your creation
• Create images on PhotoShop CS2 for print
• Paint and retouch images
• Create and secure PDF files with Acrobat 7.0
• Edit and extract text and graphics
• Build and publish a Web site with GoLive CS2
• Work with multimedia

Packed with easy-to-follow steps and guidance, you’ll be up to speed with all the features in no time. With these six great reference guides rolled into one, this is the ultimate book for becoming a CS2 pro!

6 books in 1-your key to success with CS2!

Your one-stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools

They all work together, and now you have one guide to help you work with each of them! First, you’ll get the "big picture" tour of the suite. Then you’ll be ready to create perfect pages with InDesign, illustrate them with Illustrator, add images you’ve edited with Photoshop, make PDFs with Acrobat, and design dynamite Web sites with GoLive.

Discover how to
* Use common menus, palettes, and plug-ins
* Design Web pages and print publications
* Create illustrations and add type
* Retouch, enhance, and reshape photos
* Save Photoshop images for print or the Web

6 books in 1—your key to success with CS2!

Your one-stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools

They all work together, and now you have one guide to help you work with each of them! First, you’ll get the "big picture" tour of the suite. Then you’ll be ready to create perfect pages with InDesign, illustrate them with Illustrator, add images you’ve edited with Photoshop, make PDFs with Acrobat, and design dynamite Web sites with GoLive.

Discover how to

• Use common menus, palettes, and plug-ins
• Design Web pages and print publications
• Create illustrations and add type
• Retouch, enhance, and reshape photos
• Save Photoshop images for print or the Web

6 books in 1-your key to success with CS2! Your one-stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools They all work together, and now you have one guide to help you work with each of them! First, you’ll get the ""big picture"" tour of the suite. Then you’ll be ready to create perfect pages with InDesign, illustrate them with Illustrator, add images you’ve edited with Photoshop, make PDFs with Acrobat, and design dynamite Web sites with GoLive. Discover how to * Use common menus, palettes, and plug-ins * Design Web pages and print publications * Create illustrations and add type * Retouch, enhance, and reshape photos * Save Photoshop images for print or the Web

6 books in 1-your key to success with CS2!

Your one-stop guide to creating great graphics with all the cool CS2 tools

They all work together, and now you have one guide to help you work with each of them! First, you’ll get the "big picture" tour of the suite. Then you’ll be ready to create perfect pages with InDesign, illustrate them with Illustrator, add images you’ve edited with Photoshop, make PDFs with Acrobat, and design dynamite Web sites with GoLive.

Discover how to
* Use common menus, palettes, and plug-ins
* Design Web pages and print publications
* Create illustrations and add type
* Retouch, enhance, and reshape photos
* Save Photoshop images for print or the Web

* Six self-contained minibooks offer an introduction to each of the powerful and cost-effective Adobe products that are included in the Creative Suite: Acrobat, GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, plus a section on integrating the Adobe Creative Suite
* Offers beginning Web and print graphic designers a look at the key features of each of the Adobe products and discusses how each tool serves a unique purpose in creating graphically rich content
* Author Jennifer Smith is an Adobe expert who owns her own Adobe-certified graphic arts training company
* Updated to cover key new features in the latest version of the suite

Great Book
I needed this. Before spending hundreds of dollars on software and classes to learn the software. Get this book! It really helps you learn what each Adobe product can do.

Not really for beginners
I was a bit disappointed with this book. I followed many of the instructions to the tee as best as I could understand the "language" and it was difficult to follow. Not to mention, you had best know where all the tools are before embarking on the lessons. I can see this becoming a great reference book as I become more developed with CS2, but for a beginner I would not recommend it.

Common sense introduction to the software
I bought this book to supplement the textbook I am using for a class in Adobe Illustrator. Personally I think this book should replace that confusing manual. Like mathematics textbooks, most software instructional materials make the same errors. They assume that the reader already has a foundational knowledge of the subject, they fail to describe techniques in a true step by step fashion, and they subtitute jargon for plain English.

This volume, like so many in the Dummies series, does a good job of assuming that the reader is a raw beginner and meeting him/her at that level, leading them through the basic knowledge of the skill or topic in a laid-back, understandable way.

This is especially helpful to those of us too old to have grown up with computers (I graduated high school in ’84, just as the Apple 2E was coming out - what a machine! Dot Matrix term papers and endless games of "Pong")! Bravo to the authors and to the entire Dummies team. Highly recommended!

Mostly satisfied- despite dissapointing performance by Amazon.
First things first: This Ebook is not compatible with any handheld device. After many a wasted hour trying to get the ebook to work on a Palm, I called the publisher, who informed me that PDA features were blocked on this book. It took me several emails to finally get Amazon to acknowledge that the book was not "Handheld Compatible". Months later they still have not corrected the website, so I am left to assume they really don’t care.

Part two: Why I did not demand a refund.
This is a reasonably informative book, with lots of good tips. The ebook format works well, and looks good on my Mac. Also, the ebook format is ideal for a computer manual, because you can jump back and forth between creative suite and the ebook, easily practicing what you learn.

This book has its shortcomings. There are some important topics that the book does not even mention. (like pathfinder and compound shapes in illustrator) Also sometimes the authors need to be a little more consistent in the names they use for tools and menus.

The book is good for discovering new things you did not know existed. I picked up many valuable hints I would not even have thought to look for. As a topic by topic reference however, the built in help that adobe supplies when you purchase creative suite is far superior to this book.

An Overall View of the Whole Package
This book is billed by the publisher as being ’6 Books In 1.’ At 768 pages, it’s a big book. As you might expect, inside it is broken down into six books, one each on:

Adobe Creative Suite 2 Basics
InDesign CS2
Illustrator CS2
Photoshop CS2
Acrobat 7.0 (What happened to the CS2), and
GoLive CS2

As is common with the ’For Dummies’ books, each of these independent books are in tutorial format. That is, they start with the installation and then do a series of ’do this’, now ’do that,’ commands. This is combined with a pretty good indexing system so that if you want to go back and look something up, you can. This makes the book useful as a reference later on.

Five of these books I’d say are entirely adequate. Book IV, on Photoshop, I’d say is a bit weak. That ’book’ is about the same length as the other books in this volume. But the Photoshop software is so much bigger, so much more complex that I think you only get your toes wet in this volume.

My suggestion is that if you are going to use the whole Creative Suite 2 package that you get this book and then another one on Photoshop alone. And since I like the ’For Dummies’ books, I’d probably get ’Photoshop CS2 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies’ to go along with this book.