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Authors: Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Edition: First (February 20, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-59243-9
ISBN-10: 0-321-59243-3
Pages: 827
Price: USA - $54.99; CAN - $65.99; UK - £35.99

If you have InDesign CS4 and either want to do more with the application, or want to get started, Real World Adobe InDesign CS4 is a great place to start. Using realistic examples and clear explanations, just about all of InDesign's powers are revealed to the user. It's a fair bet that many owners of InDesign received that application as part of purchasing one of Adobe's Suites and are not all that sure about what to do with it. As opposed to (say) MS Word, you can't just open InDesign and start typing. Since InDesign (ID)is a page layout application, it doesn't know "where" you want to type. Thus, if you are completely unfamiliar with ID, you can't even start using it. So, from the willing beginner to the intermediate and the experienced users, this book is a welcome asset.

For some time now, Adobe has provided no "paper" manual with their applications. To add insult to injury, if you go to the help menu in any CS4 application, what you get is "cloud," or community help, sort of a wiki approach. [Hint: if you do go to Adobe's web help, look for a link to download the PDF manual for that application. The PDF download link is not always in the same location, but in general, look for it in the upper left or right corner of the page. For reasons that are not completely clear, Adobe chose to not include the PDF manual on the CDs/DVDs.] Nonetheless, Adobe, like most software manufacturers, has not always created manuals that one might rave about. This has created a continuing market for 3rd party writers to fill in the void. For InDesign's uses, the void is fairly well filled with this Real World InDesign CS4 book.

I've long been a fan of the Real World series because they take a very practical approach to their books. That is, "This is what I found when working with the application..." The biggest problem with a manufacturer's manual is that tends to be very dry and straight forward when explaining a process. Also, manufacturers' manuals tend to focus on what the application can do and how to do that operation. The Real World series tends more to focus on what the reader wants to do and how to obtain that from the application. That's a big, but subtle, difference.

The quality of the printing is fine with the exception of how the screen shots are rendered. I'm sure that when a book comes in as large as this (827 pages), anything that can help bring down costs is considered. It seems that screen shot images suffered from this, and are therefore not as clear and crisp as I would like. Neither line art images nor text appear degraded, both of which are very easy to see and read; only the screenshots seemed to have suffered a bit.

This book is not necessarily for beginners; if you want an explanation of why printers use picas and points, sorry, this is not the book. If you are new to computers, this is also not the book (nor the application). On the other hand, if you want an explanation of the differences between slugs and bleeds, it's there. Also, beginners tend to want quick, simple answers to their questions, and this book has no quick simple answers. It's for people who want complete answers so they can use InDesign to its full potential. Beginners should not feel they need to avoid this book, just be aware you are going to find more information than you might want to receive.

The general breakdown of chapters is okay but I do have some issues with how material is labeled. More on that in a moment. You should probably consider using the table of contents when working through this book to get a good perspective on the subject you are learning about. For example, when setting up a new document, it's important to know if you are setting up a page, a story, a magazine, or a book. Proper setup at the beginning can save you a lot of time later in the process if and when you need to change the structure. As such, setting up master pages can be just as important as setting up pages, and setting up styles can make a big difference if you want a table of contents.

Understandably, at 827 pages, it's not expected for you to read the entire book prior to starting InDesign, nor is it expected for one to read one region and expect to be good to go. This is a book for flipping back and forth from section to section, page to page, as you work to take it all in. There is a lot here, and the good news is that it's fairly complete and easy to follow.

This book was written (according to the authors) using InDesignCS4, and one of the great new features in CS4 is cross-referencing. That is, you can have a Section, Illustration, or Table in the publication and refer to that item in some other location in the text, and refer to the section number or page number. That link is always active and always updating. Unfortunately it was not used as much as I would have preferred, as (for example) in the section called "Creating a New Publication." In that section, there is a recommendation to "... see 'Defining Sections,' later in this chapter" without also adding "on page 93." My only guess is that since the authors were using a beta copy of InDesign to write a manual for a completed application, it's possible that that feature wasn't as developed as one may have hoped during the writing process. Sometimes you do what you can, not what you want.

Speaking of authors, there are times where David Blatner refers to "Oly" in the text (if there are sections where Olav refers to "Dave," I have not found them yet), but otherwise the writing is seamless and there's no real way to discern where one author is working on one subject versus the other author. In other words, the writing flows quite well and is easy to follow regardless of the complexity of the subject. That makes sense because Olav Martin Kvern is a long established graphic designer and was one of the designers of InDesign. He's the author of a number of books. David Blatner is well known around the web for many things. A variety of his tutorials, blogs, and many other things can be found at his site, InDesign Secrets.

I have three criterion for grading books. The first is how easy is it to find things. When you have a book as massive as this, finding the information easily is fundamental; no matter how good the information is, if one can't find it, the information is worthless. With this book, things are mostly good, but not great. There are two aspects to finding things, one is finding specific things you are looking for, and also discovering things that you may not have been looking for. For example looking at the table of contents (one of my favorite places to look for things), in the chapter on text, is a listing for "Find and Change." What is not shown are the subcategories that (in this case) would include the subsection "Finding and Changing Text with GREP." Seeing that might elicit wondrous calls of joy from someone who is familiar with GREP and not expecting to see that feature in Find and Change. Similarly, in the chapter on type, if one is looking up "Styles," he or she might be hindered by this book's choice to identify within subsections of paragraph and character styles as "Formatting," while also having a subsection called "Styles." Within the book's text, in the section on paragraph and character formatting, these items are referred to in the text as Styles, just not in the sub-heading nor in the table of contents. Fortunately, the index is very well laid out with good explanation for the terms placed therein. If you are looking up GREP in the index, you can clearly see that you can access GREP via the Find and Changing, as well as paragraph styles being identified as Paragraph Styles.

My second criteria centers around how adaptable the examples and explanations are to your needs. If a book provides cookie-cutter examples for how to achieve something and doesn't explain enough for the reader to apply that example to a project, then the author(s) has/have failed. In this regard, these authors have succeeded completely. Examples are plentiful and varied, so that if your need is not specifically covered by the authors, you are provided with enough information to adapt what you see to your needs.

Lastly, my third criteria is whether this is the only book you will need. Books can be expensive, and if your money is limited, you probably wish to avoid spending for multiple books. In this regard, this book also hits the mark perfectly. While you may chose to get additional book(s) on focused parameters, most readers will find pretty much anything they want with this one book. Whether beginners will want to supplement this with a beginners book is up to them and their background knowledge and abilities. If they are willing to stretch a bit, they will be rewarded.

I do have some requests for the authors for future renditions of this book. Please consider adding sub-subsections of chapters to the table of contents. One of the big losses of card catalogs in libraries was the pleasure of discovering other books you were not looking for but found as you ran your eyes across the various cards while searching for the title you (thought) you wanted. If a table of contents can list more of these sub-subsections, it'll be easier for readers to find a specific subject while increasing the chance they will find things they didn't know they were looking for.

I'd also suggest they find someone else to do their cover. What on earth is going on with the Borg shooting electric bolts, magic hats, flaming eyeballs, and sooty chimneys from industry? Sorry, but I don't get it. Covers can be a challenge, I understand that. But if I'm glancing around in a books store, concepts of InDesign, page layout applications, printing, etc. is not what I get from that cover. My apologies to whomever designed this. The good news is that the cover is the only, the only thing about this book I truly didn't like. As such, it's hardly worth the text I've used. Please do not judge this book by its cover.

Overall Real World Adobe InDesign CS4 is an excellent tool for learning an excellent application.

___________ 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.