PDF with Acrobatincludes plenty of illustrations--you'll find it easy to follow along with procedures as you match what's on your screen to the book's screen captures. The author does a good job of explaining the Acrobat utilities as they exist in both Windows and Macintosh environments, providing screen shots from both operating systems when he explains operations (like printing) that differ on the two platforms. The only fault is the lack of a companion CD-ROM containing Acrobat Reader. But the inconvenience is minor since you can get the program free of charge on the Web.--David Wall

Topics covered: Acrobat Reader, Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat PDF Writer, and Acrobat Capture, as well as the Acrobat editor itself.

Woefully inadequate and misleading.
This book, despite its modest cost, is probably the worst I've come across for what is a very useful application for creating cross-platform e-documents. What is does do well is self evident given a little time and patience with the program; what you would like to know about is incorrect; and what you don't need to know about is gone into at great length. In short - a particularly useless and frustrating book written by someone who should know better, since he is one of Adobe's top-rated authors. I wouldn't like to be reading their least-able if this is what is reckoned to be of merit.

To be fair, even Adobe can't make much of a job with their own in-house publications and their included help-guide, which, although comprehensive, is incredibly irritating to wade through.

Someday - Somebody - Somewhere, will be able to produce a book, or books that will actually tell us how to use all those great applications without us having to sweat blood.

Meanwhile... I'm not holding my breath.

This book in particular is great for users and developers of PDF documents that are definitely experienced in using the Acrobat 4.0 product, but just need a little help to get some of the tedious and quirky tasks done. The first time user may benefit, but will be lost in the book until they start interacting with the software on their own.

I am a software developer and I have a whole set of the "visual quickstart" guides on my shelf. I use at least one of them everyday. A definite buy for software developers!

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