Category: Just Shelley

Brand: O’Reilly Pocket References and Guides

Concept (from the site):

O’Reilly’s Pocket References and Pocket Guides are comprehensive, inexpensive, compact, and easy to use. Our Pocket References provide you with quick lookup of the hard-to-remember details of programming and web syntax, while our Pocket Guides are short, focused tutorials that explain the basics of new technology, as well as valuable power user tips.

Books reviewed:

Derrick Story’s Digital Photography Pocket Guide and Digital Video Pocket Guide

Google Pocket Guide by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, and DJ Adams

In a word: Brilliant

Slightly longer word:

Of all the O’Reilly brands, I think the Pocket Guide and Reference series is the one with the most potential for explosive growth. Inexpensive books that focus on either syntax (for the references) or on quick in-the-field how-tos (for the pocket guide) that can easily fit into a purse or camera or computer bag–how can they go wrong?

For instance the Digital Photography Pocket Guide by Derrick Story (caveat: one of my favorite O’Reilly people) contains these little tutorials about finding yourself in a specific photographic situation, such as taking a photo of a tall building under certain conditions, and then provides quick, easy to apply advice that encompasses the photographic concepts that apply in this situation (issues of perspective and changing camera angle) and what you can do with your digital camera to make the shot work.

Have a digital camera and want to do a panoramic? Have a particular photograph you want to capture but part of it is overexposed? Want to take a closeup of a flower? The premise of this book is that these are specific questions people have when taking pictures, and Derrick provides simple and easy to follow instructions that suit most digital camera types. Rather than provide a book that covers the basics of photography, it provides how-tos, and to be honest, most people buying a digital camera today don’t want to know the history of photography–they just want to take nice pictures of their grandkids.

By keeping the books focused, they’re small enough to carry with you, and inexpensive enough that by the time you’ve mastered the little tips and tricks, you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

O’Reilly can and should look at going beyond just the digital world with this series. There’s potential in them little bitty books.

Now, returning to my question of writing this type of book: would I be interested?

Answer: oh yes, indeedy.

From a writer’s viewpoint, what I like about the series is that you can write a book in a month, two at the most, and be done. After working on 15 books that are several hundred pages each, it would be nice to do a book that was finished simply and quickly; one you don’t have to worry about covering every little nuance of the topic. Writing computer books can be very tiring, as you try to balance the production needs of keeping books to a specific brand and number of pages, but still provide enough material to cover any number of reader’s interests in the future. When you have a book that’s at about 100 small pages (probably about 50 pages in a regular computer book), you can’t meet everyone’s needs, so you can focus on one particular aspect, and just go to town.

In addition, there are some topics that really fit a smaller book. The Google Pocket Guide strikes me as this type of book, with its focus on how to maximize your use of Google’s services.

The only thing holding me back would be the fact that most of the topics I’d be interested in doing a Pocket Guide or Reference on, have already been done. This includes MySQL (by George Reese, whom I know from long ago early JDBC days, and there’s none better when it comes to databases), SQL (by Jonathan Gennick, O’Reilly’s DB Man, so SQL’s been thoroughly covered), Linux (darn, I didn’t see this one at first and thought ‘Ah Ha!’, and then saw it in the list), and various assorted other topics.

However, given a week or two, I think I could come up with some fresh topic ideas. And if O’Reilly starts dabbling its toes in ponds outside of the digital genre, there’s a world of possibilities.

You can get most of these books for about 10.00US on Amazon. I imagine there might also be a time when O’Reilly will package related books into a nice DVD boxed set type of package, and you could save even more, but that’s only conjecture on my part.

For someone who has mainly read the O’Reilly animal books, Adobe Photoshop CS and Digital Photography: Expert Techniques have been a completely different experience.

Both books are beautifully produced, rich with graphics and using the glossier paper that is typical with highly graphic publications. However, like the animal books, both are rich in detail with lots of examples and tutorials.

The Adobe Photoshop CS: One on One book is by a well known Adobe trainer, Deke McClelland, and includes a 2-hour tutorial on CD. As you step through the video you can follow along with the examples (also loaded on the CD), as you learn all the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop. Though the book is focused on the newest Photoshop, CS (version 8.0), I found that most of the examples worked equally well with my Photoshop 5.0 on Windows and Photoshop 6.0 on the Mac.

I really liked the comfortable writing style, and the fact that the author embeds his own opinions into the text. That’s important – you don’t want someone to just tell you how to use Unsharp; you want someone who will tell you why you would want to use Unsharp over the other Sharp filters (even though he will also demonstrate these, too).

Photo correction is a major component of the tutorial, but much of it is focused on some pretty extensive photo retouching, in addition to building rich graphics for publication. This book will be particularly good for someone who wants to learn some nifty new tricks with Photoshop–including good examples working with the layers, which I don’t use probably as much as I should. However, I did use the book to help me tweak the production quality of some images I was trying to print out (to inkjet).

The images in the book are wonderful, and the production quality is above average. This is not a cheap book. If I have one problem with it, it’s that each chapter has an introduction and summary section associated with it. You know what I’m talking about: “Here’s what you’ll learn…” and “Here’s what you learned” with questions and answers. I’m not a kid, I don’t need this type of assistance. However, this is only a couple of pages in each chapter, and easily ignored. So ignore it, unless you like that sort of thing.

Good book, could definitely recommend for all beginning to beginning/intermediate Photoshop users.

The next book, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques had a little more appeal for me primarily because I don’t necessarily use all the nifty tricks of Photoshop, but I would like to improve my use of the digital camera.

This is an unsual book. As with the Photoshop book, it’s full of beautiful images, but the focus of the book is how to set up and take the best image directly, rather than using Photoshop later to try and recover the image. And it covers everything, including the equipment you’ll need, why, and basic photography how-tos and information such as focal lengths and the use of gray cards for accurate color balancing.

Once you have your image, the book then gets into basic digital photo manipulation and correction, but with an assumption that you have had some exposure to Photoshop. The reason for this is that the two books are meant to complement not compete with each other.

Digital Photography has chapters such as “Retouching and Rescuing Photos”, “Sell it on the Web” (which includes some good advice on creating portfolios and how to make animated images), “Bringing out the Best Picture”, and so on. It also has a chapter called “Creating Fictitious Photos”. For the photo purists out there, “Creating Fictitous Photos” will drive you crazy. The chapter focuses on how to create images by merging multiple images, or removing entire objects–even how to create a collage! This is a twisty chapter; if you like to play around with your images, you’re going to like this chapter.

All in all, if you’re not experienced with photography and have or are planning on buying a digital camera, and then investing in either Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, this book would be a very good use of your money and time. Even if you’re fairly experienced with photography, there are some interesting tricks in the book that should make this is a good buy.

I think that O’Reilly’s going to do well with these new brands. I believe that digital photography is going to open photography up to a whole new audience, and the members all going to want to know how to do great photos. The book packaging– covers, graphics, and the production quality– are perfect for selling the books.

(Once you convince people that O’Reilly books aren’t just for geeks, anymore. )

Now, would I write for either of these series? Not a chance.

I am in the midst of taking my photos in a new direction, and taking a lot of my work back to ground zero. Writing for a book like these is best left to those people who have had their ground zero moments. Additionally, I’m not a heavy hitter with Photoshop, having just started mastering Unsharp. So it would make no sense for me to work on this series, I couldn’t do the books justice.

They sure are pretty books though. I wonder if I can convince O’Reilly to do a second edition of Practical RDF, but using photographs? I can demonstrate an RDF Photography Finder.