Adobe InDesign CS6 Classroom in a Book

Adobe InDesign CS6 Classroom in a Book ★★★★
I show my age when I recall purchasing one of the original Aldus PageMaker programs. It was nice, because it treated type like a typographer would have, rather than an amateur using a word processor would do. Each upgrade seems to get better. InDesign CS6 is now focusing on the ability to publish eBooks and automated .pdf files. Much of the print typography functionality has improved significantly but mostly unnoticeably if one were to simply upgrade from CS4 or CS5 to CS6. Yet, it is easy to tell that Adobe has worked with professional publishers in order to make their life easier. This book offers a very superficial review of those improvements, and the broad spectrum of functions that are contained within InDesign.
Classroom in a Book is designed for the earlier amateur, and goes through steps to familiarize a person to InDesign in a painfully slow fashion, though not so painfully slow to one who has never used the program before. Much of its treatments of subjects is very superficial. While this book contained many more explanations about various functions than its Photoshop counterpart, it still lacked in giving the learner a good idea as to how to get something done. Its technique of walking the reader through various projects does better at informing the reader of InDesign functionality,  than teaching the reader how to really use the program. Learning to use InDesign is best accomplished by simply using the program, and  reading other texts. This book provided great ideas and vision for future publications, and was great as a re-briefer for InDesign after not having used much of the built-in power of the program. Thus, the four stars.