Are there any books that cover entire CS4 Suites?
I didn’t know. But a quick search on Amazon yielded some promising results in the form of a Dummy’s Guide, due out on Feb 17 of this year. Now, keep in mind that there are several suites from which to choose, each one geared towards a different market. The suites mostly differ in which applications are bundled, though many individual products have different editions. Photoshop, for example has Standard, Extended and Elements. The Master Collection has most, but not all, of the available products. So, putting together a book that covers everything would be a monumental task.
So, I turned the question around and asked Art what he wanted to accomplish with the Suite he owned. Art is going online with his business and needs to do a little graphics work, photo editing, and web design. I recommended he search for some online training sites, and pointed him to lynda.com and CommunityMX.com as two starting points. Here’s why…
lynda.com is a wonderful resource for video tutorials covering just about everything you want to do, from beginning to professional. They have many well-respected instructors and some excellent quality standards, from what I’ve seen. However, they do tend to be expensive for the average user. For your money, you get to select from a huge variety of video training aimed at learning the tools themselves.
CommunityMX.com (CMX) also addresses many of the individual applications, but is geared more towards written tutorials to accomplish specific tasks. The Dreamweaver series is a departure from this approach that guides you through virtually every aspect you need to learn Dreamweaver inside and out. And, they’re working on similar series for other applications. With any luck, these will be hitting the virtual shelves very soon (I’m working on the Photoshop series, starting from CS4). CMX is less expensive, but has the advantage of being able to quickly work through several targeted tutorials, rather than sifting through videos to get specific information.
Between these two resources, Art should be very well placed to get his site up and running with a little work.
