This book is easy reading. However, the author wrote this book on how he uses Photoshop. He doesn't go into certain details like dissolves. He suggests in the book to take out the swatch palette for it is useless. I found it useful and I'm sure others probably would too. Not a book to use to study for the ACE exam.

I received Photoshop with my scanner, and had no manual to refer to. This book is easy to read and allowed me to begin working with Photoshop quickly. However, you will need another reference if you want to achieve the any of the advanced effects.

I found this book very easy to understand and follow I was up and manuvering around Photoshop comfortably after reading only the first few chapters. This is a great guide that shows all what photoshop can do giving great tips and techniques. Ultimately, its your imagination and creativity that will unlock the true power of Photoshop 4.

I liked the book Chance by Peggy Adair I thought that it was a great book. The main character is Chance Morgan and he is always getting into some type of trouble. His father abuses him and he cant't get along at school. Chance leaves home and suddenly realizes that it is not any better living with a couple of older teenage drug dealers.There he is abused even more and ends up in the hospital thinking that he is santa clause. Attempted robbery sends Chance to a foster home and will that be any better for him? You will have to read the book and find out. The book is one that you won't want to set down because you always want to know what is going to happen next. It is a very fast pace book. It tells a story of couragae and hope for a young boy.

I remember the kind of the abuse that Chance constantly got from his father. When he was thrown up against the wall and after that his father just left and went outside to work on his vehicle. Now that is really really low. I feel for Chance even though he is just a character.

Si usted es un profesional de las artes gráficas, ilustrador o arquitecto que desea utilizar Photoshop para sus trabajos, este libro dará tantas vueltas que lo cansará antes de aprender lo básico. Si le da valor a su tiempo y desea aprender le recomiendo Photoshop 4 for Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide de Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas.

I have to say, the For Dummies books are excellent, and have helped me crack most of the features of Photoshop. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Gilbert Adair, a novelist, biographer, and critic presents a series of eighty essays about the state of culture. He focuses on politics and on the popular and literary arts - cinema, theater, opera, fiction, and visual arts. Though the title might suggest a comprehensive analysis of today's cultural trends, his "surfing" has nothing to do with the Web. Instead, his overview is highly infused with a British literary and artistic sensibility. These essays are perfect for intellectual, cultural connoisseurs. However, recreational readers may find Adair's numerous references to the early 1990s British cultural scene obscure and remote. Adair discusses some American movies and offers some interesting insights, although his writing is complex, even convoluted. The dense essays are packed with literary asides and personal references. We [...] recommend this book to students of modern culture, arts aficionados of an intellectual or Anglophile bent, and those who read everything about the movies, no matter how challenging.

This isn't so much a review as a correction - this book is a paperback. It's worth every cent though!

_Wonder Tales_ is a small and expensive collection of French courtly fairy tales, most written by upper-class women. Their themes seem frivolous now, but the stories were actually quite subversive for their time; in them, the authors promoted female autonomy, true love, and marriage by choice rather than by arrangement. (The authors themselves often were the victims of terrible arranged marriages. In these stories they dream of a better world.)

The stories are not the succinct tales we are used to; they can be byzantine and winding. Just when you think it's time for "happily ever after", in comes another twist. But the tales are for the most part both funny and romantic, and I enjoyed them.

This might even be considered essential reading, if you're reading _From the Beast to the Blonde_. As I read Warner's scholarly study, I kept wishing I had access to the obscure stories she was constantly quoting. When I found this, it helped a great deal; I only wish _Wonder Tales_was sold in paperback as a companion volume to Beast/Blonde.

As one of the editorial reviewers comments, this book is intended for gift-giving. It is a charming, diminutive hardcover containing six French fairy tales from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, translated by some prestigious modern writers and translators, with an introduction, biographical notes, and bibliography by Marina Warner. These tales (and those in future volumes which Warner says she hopes to bring out) are especially interesting to read after Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, which examines the French salon society and its members (mostly women) who used the writing of these tales as a form of social protest as well as entertainment and even escape. But three of these six tales, as well as a number of others from the same milieu, appear in translations by Jack Zipes in his inexpensive paperback "Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales." If you are interested in a broad selection of these tales, including some famous ones like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Sleeping Beauty" (complete with Perrault's violent episodes that are often left out in children's versions), Zipes is a good choice. The texts are there, along with some scholarly introductions and biographies of the authors of the tales in a mass-market format.

Warner's book is more aesthetically pleasing. Its elegant, whimsical design and first-class literary translations invite the reader to escape into stories that are part magical fantasy and part social commentary. These tales are longer than the usual children's fairy stories, and they tend to have more elaborate adventures and quite worldly descriptions of clothing, decoration, and other amenities of aristocratic life. Most of the plots resolve themselves through the intervention of fairies, whose actions may seem unmotivated (deciding not to help a heroine on one page and then suddenly turning up to save her from being eaten by an ogre a couple pages later). I personally find this easier to take in this charming little hardcover than in the no-nonsense mass-market format of the Zipes collection.

Warner's book is also significant in that, in addition to the three tales that overlap with Zipes, it contains some genuine rarities in the genre. According to Warner's introduction, two of the six Wonder Tales, "Bearskin" and "Starlite", have never been translated into English before, and Charles Perrault's tale, "The Counterfeit Marquise," has never been included in previous Perrault collections (perhaps because, having no supernatural characters, and taking cross-dressing as its theme, it would not be considered appropriate for the juvenile audience that these collections have historically targeted).

Regarding the translations themselves, I compared at random some paragraphs in the stories that appear in both books. The quality of the prose is not miles apart, since both books strive for accuracy in translation. Nevertheless, if you admire the writing of John Ashbery, Gilbert Adair, Terence Cave, Ranjit Bolt, and/or A. S. Byatt, that could be another reason to choose this book.

This book covers most of Word Perfect Office 2000 in the usual quick and easy "for dummies" style, but it does NOT (as promised in the synopsis) review the use of Paradox. If you want info on using Paradox you will have to go somewhere else.

For those who have never used Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 before like myself, this book is the best start to get you familiar with this office suite. And also if you don't mind reading Dummies books, they can be entertaining as well.

A nice book of effects - good for the beginner. Many, many photographs accompany the easy-reading text, which is also well-written and easy to follow. Construction of several simple props are described, though not in detail. Nothing on presentation, etc. - all on the tricks themselves, as the title makes clear. reviewed by Tom Raymond, 7/24/95

Alice Through the Needle's Eye is a delightful sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. This is a romp through the alphabet, in the manner of the Looking Glass chess game,full of word-play fitting locales to the letters, as in the title, the Needle's "I" and complete with poetry that almost could have been from long-lost Carrollian manuscripts.

I have used the Cooke text in teaching electronics math for a few years now. The treatment is thorough if a bit technical. If you want a good math book without electronics theory look elsewhere. The electronics is rigorous but the book is a good companion to Grob's Basis Electronics.

Mrs. Adair has produced a charming and illuminating volume of poems with a spiritual theme. Most are very personal and deeply evocative, and her voice is clearly one of strong and fulfilling belief in Christ. The brevity of the volume makes it a welcome read, again and again.