Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book

This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3 is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe’s powerful vector drawing software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader’s growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations

improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it’s automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it’s print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more. Whether you’re brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3’s new features, this book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.

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Effective Web Design, 2nd Edition

This is a nuts and bolts coding book. In it are examples showing how to hand-code, in XHTML, sites that include images, links, tables, frames, style sheets–just about everything you might want. There’s also extensive advice on planning your site design, knowing your audience, and doing e-business.
The author’s fundamental approach to effective Web design is what she terms the “cross-compatibility concept,” which is based upon two principles: creating valid code in the first place and creating code that will cause an older browser to either pass on content it can’t handle or offer “graceful degradation.” This runs counter to similar books, which advise serving up different content depending upon the user’s browser.


The book is aimed at those who have used Web layout applications like GoLive, Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, but now wish to know more about the underlying code; s well as those who may already know HTML but would like to learn proper XHTML, especially as a step toward learning XML. The author served on the W3C HTML Working Group as an invited expert, and her confident knowledge in this area is evident in her writing.

Her Web consulting company is called WebGeek, which isn’t surprising since the tone of this book is distinctively “geeky.” But anyone looking to sharpen his or her coding skills shouldn’t be deterred by that.

Beginners will find the book rigorous, but Webmasters will appreciate the chapter on code validators and how to interpret error reports, and the one on improving a site’s accessibility for the disabled.

Although it’s less effective in dealing with basic design issues like balance and visual unity (it gets marks for effort) or in the homemade (decidedly non-slick) look of sample site designs and graphics, this book does deliver when it comes to the exacting details of XHTML. The index is as thorough as that of a science textbook, and the appendices provide quick access to the XHTML abstract module definitions and all the elements and their attributes. The CD-ROM contains code referred to in the book, along with a lot of shareware and trial copies of Web utilities for FTP, code validating, browsers, and other useful applications.

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