Books for/about - pdf

Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Ted Padova

ISBN: 0764583786
List Price: $39.99
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Summary: A Comprehensive Disappointment
I don't know what's going on with this book. The prime difference between version 6 and version 7 is the inclusion of Adobe Lifecycle Designer. This book says virtually nothing on such an important area. It does little to address database connections.
Unfortunately, there is no real reference for this program.
It covers commenting and stuff like that, but overall it is a big heavy great looking book that has left me still struggling.

Summary: Useless for Designer Forms
I bought this specifically for information about using the new LiveCycle Designer application that comes with Acrobat Professional to create interactive PDF forms. All of the information in this book (Chapters 26-29) is wrong about that app--none of the dialog boxes match, or are even close, and the program doesn't work the way it's described. I'm guessing that Adobe changed it after the book was written.

Summary: The Childrens Bible
A bible for the inexperienced with acrobat.. If you have never opened up the program, than I could see how this might be considered a bible. Just like any childrens bible is compared to a regular bible.

If you have any experience with acrobat, don't waiste your time.

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	PDF Reference Version 1.6 (5th Edition) Publisher: Adobe Press Authors: Adobe Systems Inc.
ISBN: 0321304748 List Price: $54.99 Amazon Price: $34.64 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: Reviews: Summary:

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	Learning XSLT Publisher: O'Reilly Media Authors: Michael Fitzgerald
ISBN: 0596003277 List Price: $34.95 Amazon Price: $23.07 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 4 Reviews: Summary: A good introductory book on XSLT Learning XSLT was a helpful introduction to XSLT and I really enjoyed my progress through the book. Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't spend too much time on lengthy explanations. Simple explanations are followed by illustrative examples that you should type and run yourself. Summary: good and bad I found Learning XSLT confusing from a beginner's point of view. It's poorly indexed, and Fitzgerald often uses XSLT vocabulary in examples long before he explains what they are. For example the "select" attribute first appears on page 105 in an example describing the lang() function, without any explanation of what it is or how it should be used. It's not listed at all in the index except in relation to the "for-each" and "sort" elements. He has a nice list of string functions but not much explanation of what kinds of contexts they can be used in, and few examples. He doesn't really explain how "match" and "select" are used together, or how processing works hierarchically by jumping between xsl snippets. Like a lot of O'Reilly books it presumes a pretty sophisticated programming vocabulary (like what does "normalize" mean anyway?). Some sections are quite useful however, and the fact that there are lots of examples is very helpful. Summary: Dissapointing presentation. Needs a rewrite The information is presented very dryly. The tone of the book is very taxing on the readers attention span. I find that one of the key tenets of these O'Reilly books is that they are usually very readable, and can be read front to back almost like a novel. I didn't find I was able to do this with Learning XSLT. Maybe it's the subject matter or maybe its the authors inability to hook the reader. Either way, it didn't work for me. Summary:

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Programming with Quartz: 2D and PDF Graphics in Mac OS X (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Authors: David Gelphman Bunny Laden

ISBN: 0123694736
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Summary: Very good
This is an extremely comprehensive guide to drawing in Mac OS X with Quartz. I was a little disappointed in the lack of Cocoa (with objective-C) ties. You can do anything with Quartz, but sometimes it would take much less time to use the Cocoa equivalents when programming your OS X applications.

That said, it's well written, and easy to follow so long as you do the examples as you go. You can certainly hop around in the book, but I found I had to read the intro chapters twice to really get the terminology.

Summary: Best book for beginning Quartz programmers
Quartz 2D is the primary graphics library in Mac OS X and is based on version 1.4 of Adobe PDF. It supercedes QuickDraw, which was used in earlier versions of the Mac OS. In Quartz 2D the coordinate space is an abstract concept defined by real values in 2 dimensions. Points in this space can be connected to form paths, such as straight lines, Bezier curves and so on. To create actual graphics on the display, the paths are rasterized as needed to generate the pixels at the display device's resolution. This permits the same graphics commands to yield the same output on any device using the best resolution available.
This book is full of clear explanations for mere mortals of how Quartz has packaged the state of the art in graphics programming. The book starts out with Quartz 2D drawing basics such as drawing and filling basic geometric forms and drawing lines. With the basics out of the way, the author goes on to show how you would use Quartz 2D both in Cocoa and in Carbon. Next there are chapters on basic computer graphics intertwined with performing these tasks in Quartz. Included topics are coordinate systems, affine transformations, and parametric curves all within the framework of performing graphics in Quartz. The book then moves on to working with images including creating CGImage objects, and importing and exporting data to PNG, JPEG, and Quicktime formats. Another chapter is devoted to working with text. There are two chapters devoted to working with PDF data, including a chapter on handling PDF images that is very thorough in its descriptions and the issues that are raised. The book is very well written and covers many complex topics in 2D graphics clearly and at a level appropriate for all programmers, and I highly recommend it for all programmers interested in Quartz.

Summary: Almost as good as Inside Mac
When I was learning to program the Macintosh in 1990, I turned to the Inside Macintosh series. At the time, you could pick up volumes I-III, read them cover to cover, and know everything you needed to get started programming the Macintosh. Today that's no longer possible for a number of reasons. Apple has discontinued the series, and just provides API references online. Plus any such multi-volume set covering everything you needed to know today would take up most of a bookshelf, rather than a few volumes. I think that's a shame since my favorite part of the books was always the discussion section -- the part that told you WHY you wanted to call various functions in a certain order.

Programming with Quartz is the discussion portions that would be in an Inside Macintosh: Quartz. It gives you the valuable concepts behind the APIs that help you write new and useful code right away, rather than spending time tweaking sample-code until you've learned your way around the APIs. It shortens the learning-curve.

My only complaint is that I wish this book had been around back in the Mac OS X 10.1 days. Even if you've already figured out Quartz this book is useful, but it would have helped significantly with the confusion many of us faced six years ago.

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	Adobe Acrobat 6 PDF for Dummies Publisher: For Dummies Authors: Greg PhD Harvey
ISBN: 0764537601 List Price: $21.99 Amazon Price: $14.29 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: Reviews: Summary:

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	PDF Hacks Publisher: O'Reilly Media Authors: Sid Steward
ISBN: 0596006551 List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $16.47 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 1 Reviews: Summary: Sucker born every day & 2 to take him The title is completely misleading. I purchased this book and software from Broderbund, after reading the reviews posted here at Amazon, believing the book and software would help me covert PDF files that I could not Save or print in its orginal format into ones I could. I can say for sure,in my opinion, the other reviews of this book led me down the "fools primrose path." Perhaps I should have read the reviews more carefully. Of course the fault is entirely mine. Summary: Contains very useful tips and tricks for PDF users This is a very comprehensive solutions catalog on all kinds of PDF related issues. Each trick is described with step-by-step instructions and contains pointers to relevant resources. The chapter listing categorizes the hacks - Consuming PDF, Managing a Collection, Authoring and Self-Publishing, Creating PDF and Other Editions, Manipulating PDF files, Dynamic PDF, Scripting and Programming Acrobat. I embrace the beauty of PDF as an end user and applications developer, but do not use Adobe Acrobat. Many of the tricks mentioned in the book is about this product. A problem is that the TOC does not tell whether or not a trick is Adobe Acrobat specific. Some of the hacks are like sections extracted from an advanced Adobe Acrobat user guide. As this is not obvious from the TOC, the content of the hack can be quite different from what I expected. Despite this problem, the book is still a very useful one-stop resource about PDF. I will recommend this book to all who need to use or work with PDF. Summary: I could have used this book on several occassions With PDF files everywhere from web sites to help files, sooner or later you will run into a situation where you need to do something to a PDF file. For me the first time I realized I needed to do something I could not was when I needed to take one and convert it to a Word format so I could quickly outline the high points to study for a certification exam. After several hours I finally got it into a text file thanks to a web site that did the conversion. But even then I lost the tables, illustrations, etc. How to do that is one of the hacks included in this book. I wish it were printed a few years ago because it would have made my life easier. After testing that hack I browsed through the book and kept finding myself asking "You can do that with a PDF file?" There are a lot of good tips in this book from making Acrobat startup faster, to converting PDF files, to automatic timed scrolling for easy reading, to creating a PDF using Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Perl, HTML, PHP, and Java. With page after page of coding, this is a tremendously useful book for anyone who wants to create or edit PDF files or change the way Acrobat works with files. PDF Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools is very highly recommended and will be put on my shelf reserved for books I want to be able to access quickly. Summary:

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Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions

Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Taz Tally Taz Tally Ph.D.

ISBN: 0782142737
List Price: $34.99
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Summary: A bargain of a book for content and price.
This book is a thorough presentation on the subject of portable document formats or PDFs. PDFs, independent of platform and application, are a saving grace in the growing complexity of the computer world. Taz Tally's book addresses the variables involved in optimizing PDFs, starting from the creation of the original document all the way to the end product, the PDF. The book explains how to customize each file depending on its use. The author also covers manipulations of Acrobat Distiller and the versatile application Acrobat 6.

The book is well written and repetitive enough so if the reader missed the message on the first round, he or she will catch it again within just a few pages. The summaries, tables, and screen samples are particularly good and support the text. The author's style is as conversational as it gets within a technical book. I enjoyed his exclamations and honesty.

I am always interested in the completeness of the index since I often have the need to solve a specific problem. The sixteen-page index held enough detail to locate a reference in the book rather than having to search from page to page. The table of contents is also complete and easy-to-use.

This Sybex manual is an excellent resource for folks creating forms, presentations, and collaborative publications as well as learning about the more conventional conversion of digital documents to PDFs. This edition comes with a CD of material supporting the text including a demo of Sonar Bookends for automatic hyperlinking (to create a table of contents, an index, and more), FlightCheck, a prepress problem identifier, and a trial version of PitStop for visually checking and editing PDFs.

Dr. Tally is author of Avoiding the Scanning Blues, a guide to desktop scanning, and Electronic Publishing: Avoiding the Output Blues, a book on desktop publishing and Postscript files. Tally is also known for his entertaining seminars and instructional videos on a variety of computer topics.

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Adobe Acrobat 6 PDF Bible

Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Ted Padova Sarah Rosenbaum

ISBN: 0764540475
List Price: $44.99
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Summary: Hard to read
I found this book to be difficult to follow. It's not just the text and layout, but the book just plows into technical detail with little regard for what makes sense or what is practical. In some cases the book goes too far into scripting with little regard for the fact that this is an Acrobat book. It tends to get lost in the technical details, making it hard to see the forest through the trees.

Summary: Good value
This book has been very helpful to me. I appreciate the tips and opinions offered by the author. The type size in the book is a bit small, but that is because the book is packed with good information. Fortunately, the book includes a ebook on CDROM which can be opened in Acrobat and zoomed in for good legibility.

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