This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe InDesign CS4

Adobe InDesign CS4 Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning page layout with Adobe InDesign and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. Explore typography and color, and learn more about creating tables and using styles. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Create layouts for magazines, newsletters, and brochures. Learn how to make Adobe PDF files and rich interactive documents. Prepare files for high-resolution printing and the Web.

“Adobe InDesign Classroom in a Book is the best way to learn hands-on with real-world examples. You'll gain exposure to good print design as well as efficient workflow techniques.” —Michael Witherell, Adobe Certified Expert, Publishing, Training, and Consulting

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Not worth the price by any stretch - 2008-12-25
Reviewer Rating:
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.

definitely not a reference book - 2009-02-17
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Errors in Most Lessons - 2009-10-19
Reviewer Rating:
My school uses this as a textbook. When we go through our homework in class, we would bring up the problems we had in the exercises. Week after week, we would discover errors in almost all the lessons, and how the results differ than those specified in the book. It just made the learning progress very confusing and frustrating. For me, this book was not useful at all.

Excellent! - 2009-02-16
Reviewer Rating:
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!

Adobe INdesign - 2009-09-23
Reviewer Rating:
I haven't had a chance to really use it yet, but I have used other books in this format by Adobe and they all proved to be a good buy.

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Desktop Publishing

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Desktop Publishing > InDesign