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Resources - Book Bytes |
| by Stephen M.H. Braitman - NBMA Director of Communications Book Bytes announces new publications of interest to our members and community in multimedia, technology, business, and culture. First appearance of each Book Bytes column is in the NBMA email events newsletter. To subscribe, send a blank email message to: nbmaevents-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. If you have a recommendation for review — and, especially, if you have published a book — send the information to . |
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October 2003 PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 2 HANDS-ON-TRAINING Shane Rebenscheid and Lynda Weinman 341 pages, $29.99 lynda.com/books www.adobepress.com The Lynda Weinman series of H.O.T. manuals takes on the latest consumer-friendly Photoshop Elements 2. Like others in the series, attractive color photographs and layout design stimulate a pleasant learning environment. In the case of Elements, the functions are already relatively instinctual, so applying an orderly training process makes the learning curve even shorter. Although geared to novice technologists, this book welcomes photographers from home hobbyists to professional shooters. All will learn more than just the basics of image management and enhancement. Whether an expert graduate of Elements will need to proceed to the full Photoshop program is determined by professional requirements. Photoshop Elements can make your end-result images just as good as with the full program, minus some archiving and publishing methods necessary for top-end results. A CD-ROM includes trial version of Elements, QuickTime movies, and tutorials. MAC OS X ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT TECHNIQUES Joe Zobkiw 434 pages, $44.99 Developer's Library www.developers-library.com Here's a necessary manual on the basics of taking Apple's "pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory-protected operating system" into the stratosphere of development. Given the flexible UNIX-based environment of the latest Mac OS, programmers can extend the functionality and dreams far beyond the essential operations of the system at the consumer level. Essentially, this is a book for those who want to fiddle with the guts of the OS and develop new systems, new games, new tools, and, ultimately, new ways of using computers for business and home applications. Zobkiw writes in refreshingly non-geek language about frameworks, SOAP, Cocoa, Quartz, and the "coolest" XML-RPC, "a specification to allow software on one computer to call remote procedures on another computer, regardless of platform." It's a surprisingly compact book filled with programming projects and techniques that will both solve problems and allow for unimaginable leaps of consciousness about what cannot and can be done. VISUAL QUICKSTART GUIDE: MACROMEDIA CONTRIBUTE 2 FOR WINDOWS AND MACINTOSH Tom Negrino 249 pages, $19.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com Contribute is the big marketplace breakthrough for Web publishing that was needed to help make the World Wide Web a friendlier place for the vast majority of business and home users who are not - or will not be - technologically savvy. More sophisticated than FrontPage but easier to use than Dreamweaver, Contribute takes the stage of the Web as a user-friendly universe with basic functions presented in almost Disney-like cheerfulness. The Visual Quickstart Guide is an ideal format for learning the program since it emphasizes logical progression and clean, simple explanations. There is a minimum of personality in the presentation, and no real explanatory byways, but that pares the book down to its ultimate utility, which can also serve as a standard reference. One quibble: In covering both Windows and Macintosh versions in one book, there are the occasional awkward juxtapositions in studying one platform then being interrupted by another, and having to find your platform's continuation. But, at only 249 pages, it's a testament to Contributes sleekness that both could be included anyone in such a slim volume. SAMS TEACH YOURSELF DVD AUTHORING IN 24 HOURS Jeff Sengstack 522 pages, $29.99 SAMS Publishing www.samspublishing.com Many in the multimedia community have hopped aboard the DVD juggernaut. The DVD format is so inclusive of industries that there is great potential in its ability to become a nexus of development for all the hard-earned skills acquired over the past decade or two, including graphic design, Flash, video, editing, sound, hypertext, writing, brand identity, marketing . . . you name it. The SAMS Teach Yourself series dives into DVD authoring with the idea that you'll end up with a professional product at the end of 24 hours working through this book. "Professional product" may be subject to debate but, along with the DVD-ROM included, you'll be well on your way to mastering the techniques of image capture, digital video editing, and using software like Adobe Premiere, Sonic Cine3Player, and SmartSound Movie Maestro (trial versions for Windows included). Obviously a book like this pays dividends to those who stay with the program. If you have some familiarity already with the DVD production process, you may find individual sections useful, but it's most valuable to newcomers as a linear teaching tool. ADOBE TYPE LIBRARY OPENTYPE EDITION REFERENCE BOOK, 2nd Edition 317 pages, $30.00 Adobe Press www.adobepress.com The latest edition of an essential reference for graphic designers in print or Web, with over 2,200 typefaces in specimen layouts. This is a great "idea book" for artists who want a quick browse through the possibilities. And, it's divided into English, French, and German sections. Oui? Ja! THE NON-DESIGNER'S DESIGN BOOK, 2nd edition Robin Williams 191 pages, $19.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com Robin Williams may be too polite to mention it but he writes a lot in his book about CRAP. That is, Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. These represent the four principles of good design everybody should understand if they produce materials that are looked at by someone else. Williams makes a point that no one reading this book will come off as a design school graduate, but by knowing something about how typography and illustration work together the most basic novice will produce efficient, attractive, even beautiful and compelling communication vehicles. The illustrations in his second edition here are often just as instructive as his lively prose. Giving four examples of a hand-out flyer, for example, starting with a "plain jane" to a "fancy dude," vividly show how simple rearrangement and typeface choices can radically alter the impact of the piece for greater effect. Even changing a title page's words from all centered to flush right can make it seem more odern and hip. Of course, appropriateness and context are important aspects of successful design, so there are no suggestions here that flashy design is always necessary. As Williams says, though, awareness is the key to success. If you have no idea there is such a thing, you will never consider it. This is a great book to start all sorts of considerings. EDITING TECHNIQUES WITH FINAL CUT PRO, 2nd edition Michael Wohl 556 pages, $39.99 FINAL CUT PRO 4: Editing Professional Video Diana Weynand 856 pages, $44.95 FINAL CUT EXPRESS: Video Editing for the Digital Enthusiast Diana Weynand 580 pages, $44.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com Three new Peachpit books delve into the premiere video editing tools of Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express. Michael Wohl is a real filmmaker so he brings practical knowledge to the editing process, having also worked to develop Final Cut Pro when it was first in production at Adobe then later with Apple. The latest edition of his book includes valuable basics on film technique, grammar, and style that can help an editor shape a film based on director intent, narrative flow, and artistic design. There are many stories and background pieces intermixed with the tutorials, giving necessary context to the subjective qualities it takes to produce effective movies. This is an informed, essential part of one's video editing education. Diana Weynand, on the other hand, is a serious teacher of the software, with her two books part of the official Apple Pro Training Series and geared towards Level 1 Certification. These are fluid by-the-numbers training manuals, clear and readable, but no nonsense. Each chapter is a specific lesson such as Editing in the Timeline and Applying Corrective Filters, followed by a summary of what you should have learned. They include extensive DVD-ROM lesson files. My recommendation is to start out with Wohl, and graduate to Weynand when you need to formalize your training for economic reasons. A HISTORY OF ONLINE INFORMATION SERVICES 1963-1976 Charles P. Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn 493 pages, $45 The MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu ** 1963 Milestone: Stanford Research Institute provides the first demonstration of remote online bibliographic and full-text searching. ** 1965 Milestone: Hal Borko's Own Little Demonstrator (BOLD) is the first online search system to demonstrate retrieval by subject classification codes rather than text words. ** 1976 Milestone: ILO/ISIS may have been the first online search system to allow search terms entered in one language to retrieve records indexed by corresponding terms in another language. As with other worthy MIT Press books, A HISTORY OF ONLINE INFORMATION SERVICES takes its mission of encapsulating chronology as a way of defining history to build a better future. Online information services may be a recent technological innovation, but it already has a considerably dense background of multiple streams of development. Bourne and Hahn write an engaging history of university and corporate research into information delivery systems that give anyone involved in search technology, online catalogs, or database design better insight as to why the tools and techniques are the way they are. And how they may evolve and what we may expect the impact of those inevitable changes to be. Most valuable, in seeing how technology developed as both successes and failures, one can avoid dogmas and prejudices that may doom breakthroughs that fail to follow predestined paths. DESIGNING VIRTUAL WORLDS 741 pages, $49.99 741 pages, $49.99 New Riders www.newriders.com This is not so much a how-to manual on game design as a why-for guide to how the abstract reality of a game's virtual world is created from concept to development. Richard Bartle has been in the game so long - he co-wrote the first virtual world in 1978 - that his book is significantly philosophical and sociological. His chapter on "Life in a Virtual World" is a detailed treatise on how skill sets, character appearance and "body," group dynamics, and combat tactics and consequences all generate a felt sense of reality. When designing games you design a world and all the internal logic (or logical illogic) it entails. "High-powered role playing virtual worlds turn character creation into an art." This is a book if you're serious about working in game development. You may learn the tools to build a game from some other source, but you won't rise beyond the level of a skilled laborer without the intellectual power that Bartle packs here. THE PHOTOSHOP SHOW Russell Brown 160 pages, $35 Adobe Press www.adobepress.com Adobe senior creative director Russell Brown fancies himself quite a showman, or comedian, as well as a pretty hot creative technician. His Photoshop book is loaded with winks and hijinks of a sort that will make it fun again to turn skin a monster green, add tire tracks to pretty faces, and expand skinny arms and legs with grotesque protuberances. So. Fun stuff. Silly stuff. But beyond the cartoon show (sew up skin! eliminate razor burn! make Elvis shimmy!) is a serious set of fascinating techniques that are not all instinctual. If you want to apply texture to clouds, remove specific lines, erase objects in the background, or even cause teeth to yellow and rot, Brown knows the fastest, sleekest, most elegant ways to produce desired results. You'll even be able to add pounds to the portrait of that client who's six months overdue on their invoice. USING MICROSOFT CRM: Special Edition Laura Brown and John Graveley 522 pages, $49.99 Que www.quepublishing.com Good customer management distinguishes even the smallest of companies. The relationship between seller and buyer is always subject to variables wide and deep, yet with effective direction and management one can help carve the pathway to sales and success. Various software packages have been introduced over the past few years to manage the various aspects of handling customer accounts, from sales tools to marketing reports. Microsoft's CRM is geared to small and mid-size companies who generally have daily customer contact. With this robust tool, a business can track all customer activity contacts, generating everything from new leads to emails to financials to customized contracts and more. It's useful for collating diverse information to provide a snapshot of trends and forecasts. The Que Special Edition manual on MS CRM gets down to the gritty details of working through the software to tailor it to the user's specific needs, including a good amount attention to the configuration power for customization. Even if you only need to set up a sales lead generator, the authors provide clear and simply explanations for getting the maximum bang for the time you'll spend with the program. A companion CD-ROM includes various CRM documents, ISV solutions, real-world examples of how various components work, and links to the CRM community. iPOD: THE MISSING MANUAL J.D. Biersdorfter 331 pages, $24.95 iMOVIE 3 & iDVD: THE MISSING MANUAL David Pogue 450 pages, $24.95 Pogue Press/O'Reilly www.missingmanuals.com The theory that hard- and software manufacturers fail to provide decent documentation with their products has stimulated the success of the David Pogue "Missing Manual" series. They're effective companions when actually sitting down and working with the tools in the here and now. If you are using any of Apple's "i" products, you'll know that even Apple's legendary user-friendly instant-use reputation could use some tweaking. As instinctive as these fabulous video and music devices are, there are some things that remain elusively non-instinctual. Such as the finer points of editing video. Or how to get around the lack of a grey gap in dragging a clip to the end of the Timeline Viewer in iMovie. Or what options do you have for incorrect billing of downloads made to your iPod. Or what to do when the iPod icon doesn't show up on your computer screen. Or how to make decent chapter sections on your DVD, really. These manuals are well worth keeping at arm's reach; you'll find yourself coming back to them constantly. THE INDIE GAME DEVELOPMENT SURVIVAL GUIDE David Michael 384 pages, $39.95 Charles River Media www.charlesriver.com The continuously enlarging success of electronic gaming has brought many newcomers into the field from the areas of design, media, and Web development. It's also brought many books into print that give the wannabe a sense of how big yet unformed the industry still is. David Michael charts a firm course between reality checking one's limitations based on background and level of intensity (gamers are very intense!), the economics of gaming, and the practical steps necessary to develop one's own product. Aspects of the process like conceptual design, team leadership, documentation, and marketing are rather generic to all software development, but there are particular qualities to game development that are not nearly so traditional. For instance, the reality is that a start-up game product is usually created by people who are working at it as a part-time venture, or even, an off-time venture. That is, they usually have "real" jobs elsewhere, and families, and lives. The cautionary principles here on how to deal with individuals and maintain a steady course of development, with honest goals and deliverables, is probably how this book is very valuable as a cautionary tale. It's a pretty basic primer, but touches on all the bases you'll need to cover if you're great idea is going to see the light of day. By the time you get to the chapter on festivals and organizations - and you've followed the book carefully - you'll stand a good chance of making a smashing public debut for your hot new game that every teenager in the world will want to buy. SAMS TEACH YOURSELF BEGINNING DATABASES IN 24 HOURS Perpetual Technologies, Inc., Ryan Stephens, and Ron Plew 456 pages, $24.99 SAMS www.samspublishing.com If you start from nothing, everything that follows is a revelation. The new SAMS 24-hour book on databases assumes the reader needs a basic introduction to the concepts of data, databases, their hardware environments, and their relationship to storing and finding information. If objects don't orient to you well, if storage is only a clunky closet to you, if SQL is something like a sugar substitute, then this is the book for you to leave the fear behind. The "24 hours" design makes each chapter a period of time devoted to one topic. A chapter on organizing data and schemas relies on explaining specific terms and rationales for why databases do what they do. The schema level, for example, is the set of organized data categories that include tables, view, indexes, functions, and procedures. Each is clearly described, and then illustrated with schematic examples. Each (hour) chapter ends with a Summary, Q&A and Workshop Quiz to be sure you have understood the concepts and details. The "24-hour concept" is simple but not simple-minded, and it works for those who do not like to be intimidated learning a whole new category of technology. eBAY HACKS: 100 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TIPS AND TOOLS David A. Karp 331 pages, $24.95 O'Reilly www.oreilly.com The O'Reilly Hacks series takes on eBay. The results are less dramatic than previous volumes, though this is a comprehensive, welcome guide to the eBay experience with some excellent insider, less-than-intuitive tips. The sections devoted to buyers and sellers are essentially complete run-throughs of all the options available for winning auctions and selling. Most of the information contained is available through eBay, but only via frustrating searches through their Byzantine Web site. Plus, most of eBay's explanations are awkwardly described. Karp is clear, at the very least, and offers much better promotion of the more valuable tools, such as bid increments, payment options, and search robots. The real breakthrough insights, however, come with the section for developers who can program powerful applications within the eBay platform to align with specific business processes. The eBay API can be programmed to communicate directly with the sales and marketing operations of a company, for example, creating unique page views for potential customers. Karp gives out enough lines of code to enable cool custom automated functions for listing, spell-checking, email alerts, feedback tracking, and more. This is where the "hack" aspect of the book really shines. Also recently published in the series: AMAZON HACKS by Paul Bausch, and WINDOWS XP HACKS by Preston Gralla. |
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