I'd really like to review this product, CS4 InDesign Classroom in a Book, but I still haven't received it more than ten days after the estimated delivery time. The seller, Avid Bibliophile, has not responded to any of my e-mails requesting information on delivery.

If you are looking to go page by page through this book to learn InDesign, I suppose it's good for that (I don't know--I didn't try using it that way). But if you want to be able to look up how to do something when you're in a bind, absolutely, positively do not buy this book. Even the premise of creating "someone else's" project so you can learn InDesign is so old school. Who has the time to waste creating a "practice" project? I certainly don't.

I've always found the "classroom in a book" series to be really well written and logically laid out. This Adobe Indesign CS4 version is easy to read, has an excellent index and really fills the gap that is Adobe's online help. It is an invaluable tool when learning the program and an essential "go to" when you are more experienced. Excellent!

I'm up to lesson 3 in this "training workbook", and I'm thoroughly unimpressed so far. The exercises contain no explanation whatsoever, so that all you end up doing is following the steps that someone used to design a project. What's more, at least twice (in three lessons) the steps have not worked produced the result they were supposed to: In one case, the text fields somehow ended up on the background layer, resulting in either text obscured by marginalia or graphics obscured by text; in the other, placing text into a text box made an image on the same page vanish.

In addition to these issue, throughout the book there have been areas of very unclear explanation or areas that are just plain wrong: One step instructs you to select the Semibold group for Adobe Garamond Pro, despite there being no semibold option for this font; another step instructs you to shift-click to select two different items when it should be an instruction to ctrl-click, as shift-clicking selects a half-dozen items. This is by no means an exhaustive list of errors I've encountered in the book, just a sampling--and again, I'm halfway through lesson 3 of 14.

Between the outright errors and the lack of any explanation, I would strongly advise anyone wanting to learn InDesign CS4 to go find a different book--this one is certainly not worth the ridiculously high price tag.

Nowadays, if you hear about page layout, it often refers to webpages. But this book is [mostly] about hardcopy page design. InDesign is a powerful and generally easy to use program that lets you make sophisticated and professional looking pages. The book has many example images, usually in colour, which helps to emphasise the vivid richness of the output. There are many ways within InDesign to emplace text on a page. The text can be short headlines, or entire paragraphs. The font sizes, families and colours can be varied. So too with the orientation of the text.

Images and backgrounds can be readily added using layers. The latter is a key unifying idea across many Adobe products.

Also, the book is more than just an exhaustive listing of InDesign tools. You can certainly treat it as such. But it also has guidelines about what constitutes good layout. Like avoiding a cluttered or jarring look. To this ends, if you have a copy of the book, step backward [so to speak] and take a second look at a typical page. Instead of focusing on the context of the text, study the entire page layout. Often, there is plenty of white space or margin. When images appear, look at the integration of these with the accompanying text. I don't know if InDesign was used for the book itself, though you'd imagine it would be. But even if it wasn't, deconstructing the book pages offers many examples of good layout.

A possible irony here. Some readers will focus on the text and images, but miss what is literally in front of them, in terms of example layout. So don't you do this.

If you do already know HTML, then you'll note one big contrast in this book. Positioning of things on an HTML page consists of suggestions to the browser showing the page. Different browsers can and often do yield different images of the same page. InDesign is about absolute positioning. No viewer ambiguities.