Customer Rating: 
Summary: Thorough reference, but not a tutorial
Comment: Despite the title, this is a reference and not a tutorial. It shows how to perform various tasks with Acrobat, such as creating PDFs from common office applications, editing and combining existing PDFs, creating forms, and using some of the special features such as shared document reviews, digital signatures, and making documents viewable and accessible on a variety of devices.
The focus in on particular features of Acrobat. There is little discussion of workflows or the steps one might take end-to-end to create a PDF with desired properties. For example, everyone has seen PDFs with tables of contents and indexes that hyperlink to the specified page, but there's no mention of that in this book and you won't learn how to do it here. There are no troubleshooting tips (for example, what do I do if my images come out fuzzy?).
The treatment leaves Adobe Acrobat Distiller a mystery. From time to time there are instructions to go over to Distiller and change some Acrobat setting, but there's no overall explanation of why it works this way. A sidebar "What is Distiller?" would have been nice.
The book is packaged with a CD-ROM containing all the exercise materials and some tutorial videos. The videos, from lynda and from Total Training, cover most of the features new to Acrobat 8 and are very well done. The book itself is competent but uninspiring.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice complement to the software
Comment: If you need an introduction to the features, intuitive or obscure, in the Acrobat Professional 8 software, this is the book for you. I looked at other titles in the market but none comes close to this book in coverage and ease of use. Pity it doesn't come for free with the software.
Summary: Thorough reference, but not a tutorial
Comment: Despite the title, this is a reference and not a tutorial. It shows how to perform various tasks with Acrobat, such as creating PDFs from common office applications, editing and combining existing PDFs, creating forms, and using some of the special features such as shared document reviews, digital signatures, and making documents viewable and accessible on a variety of devices.
The focus in on particular features of Acrobat. There is little discussion of workflows or the steps one might take end-to-end to create a PDF with desired properties. For example, everyone has seen PDFs with tables of contents and indexes that hyperlink to the specified page, but there's no mention of that in this book and you won't learn how to do it here. There are no troubleshooting tips (for example, what do I do if my images come out fuzzy?).
The treatment leaves Adobe Acrobat Distiller a mystery. From time to time there are instructions to go over to Distiller and change some Acrobat setting, but there's no overall explanation of why it works this way. A sidebar "What is Distiller?" would have been nice.
The book is packaged with a CD-ROM containing all the exercise materials and some tutorial videos. The videos, from lynda and from Total Training, cover most of the features new to Acrobat 8 and are very well done. The book itself is competent but uninspiring.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice complement to the software
Comment: If you need an introduction to the features, intuitive or obscure, in the Acrobat Professional 8 software, this is the book for you. I looked at other titles in the market but none comes close to this book in coverage and ease of use. Pity it doesn't come for free with the software.