Wally Wang’s Totally Tasteless Photoshop Elements
by Wally Wang
Osborne / McGraw-Hill
ISBN 0-07-222884-9, 304 pages
$24.99 US, $37.95 CN, £14.99 UK
This title turned me off, so I placed the book at the bottom of my Book Bytes pending stack. The pile became so large that it fell over, forcing me to pick up this “tasteless” volume and glance through it. What a surprise!
“Tasteless” refers to this wacky author’s sense of humor and political opinions, indicated by bizarre captions to the images he uses to illustrate the instructive text. Such as:
• By digitally modifying car photographs, used car salesmen can now alter reality with fantasy and become as untrustworthy as a UFO investigator working for the U.S. Air Force.
• The Expand Selection dialog box lets you increase the entire size of your selection marquee by a fixed number of pixels, such as this scene, cut from the movie The Planet of the Apes, showing a topless orangutan dancing around a pole in a strip club.
You get the idea. But what you don’t get from either Wally’s title or weirdo captions are the clarity and focus he brings to basic instruction for Photoshop Elements. This book is one of the very best tutorials for learning what Elements’ many arcane symbols and forbidding menu items do, how they work, and when to use them.
Beginning immediately, I’m going to use Wally Wang’s Totally Tasteless Photoshop Elements as my primary course book when teaching classes in Elements. Humor aside (and much of it should be put aside), beginners and many intermediates can’t go wrong with Wally on hand.
MyMac.com rating of 4.
+ + + + +
Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Little Black Book
by Gene Steinberg
Paraglyph Press
ISBN 1-932111-86-7, 548 pages
$29.99 US, $44.99 CN
Turn to any page:
• (384) “Installing Fonts Under Panther” — Here you’ll find detailed, through, straightforward instructions, tips, and warnings, with itemized steps for doing everything an intermediate or power user will need to understand. I didn’t know much about Panther’s powerful font management tools before studying this section, and now I’m an expert.
• (148) “A Look at Apple’s Search Utilities” — I’m new to live searching via Sherlock’s Internet engine, and the range of built-in and customizable info sources is extensive and impressive. As Gene admits regarding the Dictionary link, “No, I don’t use it for every paragraph, but I’ve been known to turn to it from time to time.” Very perspicacious of you, dear author.
Regular readers of our Book Bytes reviews know I’m a huge fan of Gene Steinberg, one of the original BIG FIVE Macintosh book authors. (Do you know who are the other four? It’s hardly a mystery.) Gene puts 500 percent into every project, and his “little black books” are among the finest.
With commercial bookshelves groaning under the accumulating mass of new Mac OS titles, how to choose? I decided Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Little Black Book is small enough in size/price, and huge enough in knowledge/accessibility to carry it daily on my rounds as a computer tutor. Time to quit writing, so I can go back to “Creating an Apple Laptop Travel Kit,” beginning on page 284 of this title, receiving our MyMac.com rating of 5.