As an aspiring professional photographer, I found this book to be an excellent tool and a spectacular read. I think it is a great book for any student learning photography, any advanced amateur, or anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of how lighting impacts their photography. Photographic Lighting Essential Skills gives a nice overview of all the major areas of photographic lighting.

GET IT GET IT GET IT! This is becoming my mantra for any book that I rate 4 stars and above. Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is no different. I would buy this book again and again if I kept losing it that is how valuable this book is. In fact, I would buy two copies and stow one in a safe to quickly retrieve if I lost the other. I LOVE THIS BOOK!

I must say, that I have become spoiled with many books now having a “Who should read this book” section, which this book is lacking. Now that being said, once I really sunk my teeth into it, this book turned out to be quite nice. At a quick glance, this book seemed to be geared toward a more advanced crowd, but upon closer examination, it is really good for novices as well.

Talk about your tricks of the trade for the newly upgraded Illustrator CS3 and Adobe Illustrator CS3: Classroom in a Book has ‘em covered. To be honest I am far from being a seasoned Illustrator user but this book gets you well on your way with an excellent and easy to understand task based learning style with exceptional supporting graphics and fun to do tutorials.

This book is split into 15 chapters, each presenting lessons for the reader to work through. As a companion to the text, it also comes with a DVD filled with exercise files and video tutorials. As a “Flash” instructor I am always seeking new and exciting ways to enthuse and engage new students. I was not disappointed!

I always like it when the author explains what the book covers and what it does not, clearly and in the beginning. This book covers that point well, so I knew ahead of time exactly what to expect without skimming the book to discover on my own.

The assumptions are a nice touch. That way again, in the beginning, you know right away if this book is geared to your level of experience and area of expertise.

Lots of supporting links is always a great touch. Plenty of links included here.

I’m an avid Adobe “classroom in a book” fan and have been for my years now (too many to count). Adobe has always provided excellent support for their programs in this “mini lesson” style. This book easily breaks apart the twists and turns of InDesign in a well written format that will appeal to the novice and the frequent user.

Since I have not used MySQL for about 5 years, which was 3.23, I decided it was time to pick up a new book since I now have the need to work with 4.1. There are two main items that stood out when I skimmed this book for the first time. It covers PERL, and PHP. I’m a huge PERL enthusiast, and now have the need to learn some PHP, so it looks like we’re off to a good start.

If you’re a web designer/developer Microformats-Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 should be on your bookshelf.

This is a great book for web designers who want to add more functionality to their websites, but worry about the amount of code they need to learn. In his book, PHP Solutions, author David Powers helps you navigate the sometimes scary and confusing world of PHP and MySQL.