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Authors: Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo
Publisher: Adobe Press in association with PeachPit Press
ISBN: 0-321-33541-4
Pages: 382
Price: $19.99 / CAN - $27.99 / UK - £13.99
Experience Level: Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced

Adobe GoLive CS2 Tips and Tricks is one of the better "tips and tricks" books to come out as it doesn't limit itself to "here's a trick, now let's move on." Rather, it packages each tip and trick into a fully developed lesson, yet doesn't get bogged down in details.

Adobe GoLive CS2 Tips and Tricks is another in a recent trend to satisfy those who don't want to read a manual but want to know all the "secrets" on how to use a program. This book of tips and tricks was written by the veritable and genial Adobe presenters Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo, who've both used the program since long before Adobe purchased the company (GoLive) that originally created the web designing program (CyberStudio). [After Adobe bought the company, they changed the program's name from GoLive CyberStudio to Adobe GoLive.] These two are a gifted pair who probably know more about this program than you know about your own nose, but who can explain whatever you want to know about the feature in question in a simple, clear, concise and understandable manner.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters (see list below), and within each of these chapters are found the relevant tips. Thus, if you want to learn about uploading trick and tips, you'd be wise to review the various items in Chapter 11.

Chapter listings in Adobe GoLive CS2 Tips and Tricks

1. Getting Started
2. Working with Sites
3. Working with Pages
4. Advanced Page Editing
5. Working with Cascading Style Sheets
6. Automating Repetitive Tasks
7. Creative Suite Integration
8. Print to Web Workflow with InDesign and GoLive
9. Adding Interactively
10. Advanced Site Management
11. Publishing Your Site
12. Versioning Files with Adobe Version Cue
13. Third-party Actions and Extensions

Another pleasant aspect about this tips and tricks book is that Adam and Lynn are not trying to play cute and/or fast and loose with puns—all titles are easily understandable. There is no question as to what "Creating Forms" or "Cleaning up a Site" mean. Thus, all of the listed tips and tricks are easy to find both in the Table of Contents and the Index.

The title of the book might lead readers to assume that there are 250 tips and tricks. This, alas, is not true. There must be around 450-550 tips, but the extra tips do not warrant their own listing. Each listed tip is a minimum one page (some tips go on for multiple pages). However, almost every listed tip has at least one side-bar tip (a simple paragraph) providing either peripheral information on the current tip's subject or a related tip about GoLive in general. For example, in the tip (#19) about "Moving, Renaming, and Deleting Files," the second side-bar tip reminds readers that GoLive has 20 levels of undo so if you drag something into the wrong folder and are not sure where it landed, undo the action.

Occasionally, some of these sidebar tips are better than the formal Tip. For example, on the tip on using the Spell checker, the main Tip is mostly a simple commentary on how to use the Spell checker (which isn't all that different from most other spell checkers). The sidebar tip did provide the nifty information in that in GoLive's Preferences one can add words directly into the Custom Dictionary in GoLive. In addition, you can edit the words there. This is particularly good because one of the quirks of GoLive's spell checker is that when you add words (by clicking on the "Learn" button) it's easy to miss that GoLive included the punctuation adjacent with the new word. That is, if you include a new word like "Coyne" but it appears at the end of a sentence ("Coyne."), that's how it will show up in the Custom Dictionary, causing "Coyne" to be flagged as misspelled).

If I have any complaint with the book, it's that the sidebar tips are not listed in the Index. What I would have loved to have seen is that the sidebar tips were listed and identified (as sidebars) by a code such as (the example below is copied from the index except for the parenthetical material)"

Printing
   background images, 133
   PDF files, 127, (sb 127), 131

As mentioned at the beginning, people seem to want the Tips and Tricks books because they don't want to read a manual. With GoLive CS2 Tips and Tricks, the authors are sort of sneaking a manual into your hands. While the book is very much a book of Tips and Tricks, the progression of the various tips and tricks is strategically designed to lead the reader on how to use the program. While this is not unique, it is very well executed in this book. Yet, as a collection of tips and ticks, it's very easy to open up to any given subject (tip or trick) and not be wholly dependent upon what was said in the tip/trick before or after. Similarly, if you want peripheral information on how or why any given setting (in the Preferences) is the way it is, this is not the kind of book that will provide all you want or need. It isn't designed as such. What it is designed to do is to provide bursts of information on a wide variety of subjects that will guide you from how to work with GoLive and its palettes and windows, plan a site, lay it out, configure pages, alter pages and the site and upload the results.

One other aspect about the tips and tricks in this book that makes it somewhat unique amongst tips and trick books is the completeness of the tips and tricks. Specifically, what most of these books tend to do is say how you do a specific action and/or use a specific tool or selection. Here, the authors tend to focus on concepts. As such, they supply a full and rounded block of information. So, for example, when they are discussing how to assign a default CSS for the pages in a site, they discuss the reasons why this is a good thing (continuity across the site), where it's achieved (selection on the Files tab of the Site Window) and three ways to fully take advantage of this feature (selecting New Document via Control-clicking, clicking on the New Page button on the toolbar, and dragging a generic Page document from the Objects palette).

This is not to say that this book will suffice as a manual by itself. If you need a manual, get a manual. Currently, the only manual for GoLive is Adobe GoLive CS2 Classroom in a Book (which I've not seen yet). On the other hand, if you already know your way around GoLive at any level, this is a great book to round out your GoLive knowledge.

NOTE: Following my policy to only give a "5" rating to books that supply "all one would ever need," this book does not satisfy that criteria. It is an excellent book and is highly recommended, but by design, it is not a complete book for everything you need to know about GoLive.

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___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.