While I was pretty familiar with NLE editing, the tools and effects of After Effects stumped me. Classroom in a Book lead me in and is opening up lots of doors. Well written and realistic projects. Good pace. I'm getting a lot out of it, at my own pace. And very importantly for a newbie, if it say's a screen looks like this, it does look like that and works just as described. This level of correlation between the text and real world is very important when you're trying to do something complex. Builds confidence.

Classroom in a Book is superficial at best. It contains numerous errors that make the lessons difficult to follow.

I would recommend Trish & Chris Meyers' "After Effects Apprentice", which is a much better book for beginniers to intermediate users. It is very detailed and the lessons were very easy to follow. These people know their stuff. I learned so much more in the Apprentice book than in the Classroom book.

I had to buy this book for school.It's full of lessons you follow along with, using art and graphics provided on a CD. As far as reference or help with your own projects, forget it. Your better off googling your question. If following along is all you need then, it's a nice book. The puppet stuff is OK. That helped a bit in learing it.
I had a question about nesting, they said it was pg 19. They just tell you what it is, not how to do it. ( Creativecow.com had a video explaining it)
I would not recommend this book.

This book totally fit my expectation. I'm a beginner in this theme and the lections and the descriptions are very clear and gave me a really good background to start my work with after effects. I can recommand this book for everyone, how will start the work with this software.

I am totally unfamiliar with Adobe After Effects and based upon the title and experience with other Adobe Classroom in a Book titles, thought this would bring me gently into the After Effects universe.

Wrong. Totally wrong.

Rather than provide an overview of what After Effects does or is capable of, the book states "Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional provides a comprehensive set of 2D and 3D tools for compositing, animation and effects that motion-graphics professionals, visual effects artists, web designers and film and video professionals need. After Effects is widely used for digital post-production of film, video, DVD, and the web. You can compositer layers in various ways, apply and combine sophisticated visual and audio effects, and animate both objects and effects." That's it. That's the whole introduction to After Effects. Hardly illuminating and certainly not helpful to the neophyte.

The authors promises to teach the newcomer fundamental concepts and features - and it dispenses with that mission in a few inadequate pages.

Then it is on to learning the new features of After Effects CS3, which is what this book is all about.

But even that is not done well. Take for example these informative sentences: "You can pucker a shape by pulling the path's vertices inward while curving segments outward." There are no explanatory illustrations.

The lessons are nothing more than instruction lists with little explanation of what you are doing or why. The back cover declares "The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe After Effects CS3 Professional". I don't think so. Not by a long shot.

Overall, a disappointment and not the way for a beginner to learn about the capabilities of After Effects.

Jerry