Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Before I purchased this book, I was a complete newbie when it came to graphical softwares. I had no idea what book to get. Fireworks 8 was brand new at the time, and there weren't many available tutorials for it, nevermind reviews.
I decided on FW8: Training from the Source from basing the series' integrity on the reviews for FW7: Training from the Source, which were fantastic. Otherwise, I would not have bought this book. Just the concept of learning something from the actual company, seemed monotonous and mundane. I expected a boring manual. :/
When the book finally arrived, I was seriously impressed with the general presentation and easy-to-understand explanation for beginners. I had read several tutorials of web languages and other programs like DW before, but this book was extremely precise and thorough with the instructions. It also has a lot of pictures, which is something I always cherish.
The tutorial also comes packed with a CD, including graphical elements you will manipulate and incorporate into your lessons. This is highly efficient, because you have the exact same image the author is refering to. Other books would just order you to fish for photos online, resulting in tedious time consumption and disimilar results.
The book slowly works you up from the ground from art editing to hotspot tools. Eventually through the process, you'll create the exemplified website from the book, which looks fantastic and professional for a ma-and-pa candy store.
However, there is one monumental flaw in either the book or the graphical software. Websites designed in Fireworks 8 are incompatible with non-Internet Explorer browsers. So if anyone were to view your site through say, Mozilla Firefox or Netscape, they would just see a slew of collapsed images and something completely different from what you see. So the point of teaching you how to construct a website and exporting it to the Dreamweaver is quite futile. I would recommend you skip that particular portion of the configurations chapter. FW8 is a graphics editing tool and it is strongly discouraged if one were to use it beyond the context of designing and authoring a graphic. If you want a WEBdesign editing tool, you need to purchase Dreamweaver 8.
Another folly of the book worth mentioning is its lack of a "How to Create Great Font Designs and Logos!" Fireworks 8 is capable of designing great custom logos and designs through filtering and layering, but the book's coverage on this section is shallow to nonexistent. I suggest you do a search for "fireworks font," where you'll find links to some great font creations through FW8. This will come in handy if you were to design a sophisticated font for your website logo or graphic.
But despite the shortcomings, and what's ultimately more important to the broad picture, is that you learn the basics of Fireworks 8 in a smooth and enjoyable process. I have never read a better tutorials book for a web language or program, period. If you're a novice-intermediate FW user, I honestly refuse to recommend a more qualified book.
With this book and prior web knowledge, I was able to design a professionally-styled website GuyFactor... (figure out the rest) ;)
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