This book is another of the wonderful books on the Macintosh being published by Peachpit Press. Tony and Carrie Webster are the authors, and I give them a 4 star rating.
The book is easy to understand, quick to read, and the information is thorough. It is almost as if the authors did something which was not do-able. How, in a book that can be read in two hours, can you cover everything there is to know about PageMaker 4.0? Well, they did it. I even found some things I didn’t know about PageMaker 4.0. The book is absolutely full of pictures, which is the reason it is so quick to read and easy to follow and understand.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is just obtaining PageMaker 4.0 and needs to learn how to use it from scratch. It is tons better than the manual which Aldus ships with the software. But, I would also recommend it for anyone who has just piddled with PageMaker and knows how to use it well enough to get by. Peachpit’s book will make you a PageMaker expert in just a couple of hours time, plus some practice, of course.
I found only one glaring mistake in the book–they assume you are working in a multi-finder environment or with System 7.0. This wouldn’t even be noticed by most of us, but to someone just starting out on a System 6.0.7 machine, it might confuse them terribly right from page 4. A simple disclaimer about the look of the different operating systems would have fixed this quickly. Other than this one complaint, I find the book very well thought out.
PageMaker 4: An Easy Desktop Reference
This huge soft-bound book, from the author of the Little Mac Book and The Mac is not a Typewriter, is another good PageMaker book out right now. Again this book comes highly recommended, but for different reasons than the PageMaker 4 Visual Quickstart Guide. This book is not to be read from cover to cover and definitely could not be, in any comfortable amount of time. Instead, the book is a desk reference just as its title suggests. The most important element of any desk reference book is its ease of use, i.e. how thorough is the index, how easy is it to find the answers you need, and how simple and thorough is the answer. Well, as usual, Robin Williams has written a very thorough, easy to understand Mac book. Her index is full of references, her chapters are arranged by subjects such as Printing or Indents & Tabs, and the back of the book is loaded with helpful Appendixes.
Getting to the information isn’t the only easy aspect of the book. The author has made understanding the information easy also. There is usually a page of general information about the subject, so that the reader has an overall understanding of the subject and how it is to be performed. Then there are specific steps to achieve different tasks. These are usually broken down into 3 columns. (See illustration.) As you can see the information is both easy to follow and very thorough, with Shortcuts, Notes, Hints. The book is also loaded with pictures and examples. You would expect a book like this to be as dry and boring as an encyclopedia, but it isn’t at all—it is full of quotes and stories that are both enlightening and funny.
The reason this book is so thick is that Robin Williams has included possibly every question anyone can think to ask about how PageMaker works. She has covered the simplest questions as well as the hardest. If you already know how to use PageMaker but every once in a while you get stumped by something, then this book would be great for you. If you are just buying PageMaker and know nothing about it, then I would suggest you forget the manuals totally and buy both of the books listed here.
