Adobe Acrobat 9 Classroom in a Book by Adobe Creative Team
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Book Reviews of Adobe Acrobat 9 Classroom in a Book
Book Review: Must have for anyone who needs to be an Acrobat Expert
Summary: 5 Stars
Easy to follow tutorials, well written. Useful even if you've been using Acrobat Professional for awhileBook Review: Great book to learn how to create PDFs from documents, photos, and the web.
Summary: 4 Stars
I run a small internet based sales business. I needed a way to convert images and text into PDF files so that I could share more info easier and faster and also have some security over what I decided to email out to customers or post to my web site. Since I sell photographs and information I wanted to promote those items, not give them away. So I bought Adobe Acrobat 9 from Adobe, then ordered the Adobe Acrobat 9 Classroom in a Book from Amazon which arrived in a few days after I ordered it.
I have a background in professional training. I found the book to be orderly and very easy to read and comprehend. If you do exactly what it says to do, START AT THE BEGINNING, and do a lesson at a time it walks you right through the process of creating and converting and combining documents into PDFs.
Chapters 1-8 were the meat of the training that I needed. Chapters 9-15 are extra gravy. Having used the product now for about a month I'm pretty fluent in creating PDFs from documents I create, from photos I have scanned, and from emails and web pages I send and visit. The nice thing is that we're really trying to cut down on paper and ink use to save some money in the business. By turning all of our receipts and invoices into PDFs we can save 100% of our business data electronically as PDFs now. That has really streamlined invoicing and end of month posting cuz we can do it all right off the computer screen now without having mountains of paper to push around to figure out what's what with every sale and invoice.
This book was essential to helping us understand how to EASILY get moving with making PDFs. Now that we have more confidence in how the program works we're experimenting with the toolbars to see the other functionality that the software has so we can jazz up these documents when we create them. Honestly, using Adobe 9 has been a bit of fun, and it's the lessons in the book that showed us how to get there in short order. It's an easy read. Just be patient and do the lessons as they have layed out for you, and you'll be humming along with Adobe 9 too.
We gave the book 4 stars out of 5 cuz now that we're using the software we can see there are a few other things it would have been nice to know ahead of time. But no one book covers everything either. We did use the CD that comes with the book but after the first few lessons it was easy to see that basically the CD provides some finished PDFs that you simply pull from a directory, open, then close again, to get you into the habit of opening, combining, and closing the PDFs when working in the different chapters. The CD is a nice way to make the whole process of learning friendlier so don't be afraid to install the CD on your computer and use it exactly the way they tell you to use it. It's simple and it works.
Cheers! J. Lemke.
Book Review: Expensive and Disappointing
Summary: 3 Stars
I've now used Acrobat for a number of years and have, for the most part, been able to figure out what I needed to do. I recently bought a new scanner (which is not yet available on Amazon) and have come across several problems while converting documents to .pdf files. Due to these matters, I thought I'd finally spend the money to buy this book to fully learn all of Acrobat (I have Acrobat 9 Pro) features. To say that I'm disappointed in this grossly overpriced book is an understatement. Much of the book is devoted to materials that do not need to be dealt with (as they're so basic) or on flashy (no pun intended) elements, such as 3-D animations and other not-so-important features that I suspect most users could care less about.
To make matters even worse, the book instructs readers to examine the help files that come with Acrobat for information (if these help files were useful, I wouldn't have needed to buy this or other books). Then there's the problem that some features are not covered in detail at all - as I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to use a new scanner and the OCR functions on Acrobat. Less than a full page is devoted to that topic and essentially nothing helpful is provided (yes, I already know how to press the button on the scanner - something that this book tells readers to do). Nothing at all is mentioned about the new feature in Acrobat 9 about "ClearScan" - the function that replaced Formatted Text & Graphics found in older versions of Acrobat. While I finally figured out what "ClearScan" was by searching the Internet, I still can't figure out how that is used to with the TouchUp Text tool (which seems to work much differently in Acrobat 9). While the results of "ClearScan" seem to be very good (at least as far as I can determine at this time), this book says absolutely nothing about it.
Overall, the book does provide some good information, but one must wade through pages/chapters of things that need little or no explanation in order to find it. While this book is beautifully published (nice paper, good graphics, etc.), it is even less valuable than Acrobat's insufficient help files (for example, ClearScan is NOT covered in any detail there either). I would not recommend this book to anyone who is already familiar with Acrobat - only to those who are true neophytes to the program. Even so, there are too many items of importance that are not covered.
Book Review: Good for novices but too expensive
Summary: 2 Stars
The book seems to be aimed at novice users, is well put together, and does a good job of moving from lesson to lesson. However, for the price I expected the book to cover more and cover it in greater depth, especially regarding forms. I consider myself an intermediate user, and did not gain any new knowledge from this book.
Book Review: Book not at fault here
Summary: 1 Stars
I purchased this book and one other at the same time for a couple of classes at university. Both books were in stock and shipped the next day after ordered. I already have one of those books that was shipped from nearly twice as far away in a location that had very bad weather. Then there is this book which I need and it has yet to leave the shippers warehouse where it was to be picked up. This will be the last time I order my textbooks from amazon despite the great prices. I am going to consider elsewhere and pay a little more for more reliable shipping.