Reviews for Adobe Acrobat 7 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides)

1. Annoyingly incomplete, poor index

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2006

   This is a highly affordable 309-page guide to Adobe Acrobat 7. Its presentation is neat and its strength has got to be its extensive inclusion of screenshots on every page. This supposedly aids the beginning and intermediate users for which the book is designed.

   Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness. Each page is split into two columns. One column is used for a step-by-step description of a particular task and the other column showing the accompanying screenshots. This means the description is extremely brief, so short in fact that if the task you want to perform has any slight element of complication, the book is unlikely to even mention it. For example, I tried to edit an existing PDF and encountered a font embedding problem -- not exactly an issue of an advanced level -- yet the book only mentions the fact that you can embed a font by ticking a box in a certain dialogue box (p. 154).

   The uselessness of the book is compounded by the unsatisfactorily incomplete index. Very few people read a computer book from cover to cover and then start using the program. People are likely to have particular tasks in mind, which is why a good index is essential. The index of this books has only offered me frustration, not solution.

   All in all, the intended level of the book seems to assume that beginners would only want to perform the most basic tasks among the wide range of things Acrobat can do. But this is a bad assumption. Beginners may want to perform just as complicated tasks as advanced users. They just don't know how, which is why a book of this sort needs to explain and describe, not omit them.

   I must admit I have not made extensive use of this book. So I'm giving it a benefit of a doubt for the sections I have not looked at closely. Otherwise it would have been one star.