Carl Young’s AcroViews

Let’s begin with a discussion of Acrobat resources in book form. I have quite a few suggestions to start, but I would love to hear yours.

Books

Here are some books I can recommend. I am sure there are many other good ones; these are just the ones I am familiar with.

Acrobat 7

Adobe Acrobat 7 PDF Bible by Ted Padova. The definitive reference for Acrobat.

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Classroom in a Book. Good self study and useful for prepping for the Acrobat ACE exam.

Adobe 7 Reader Revealed by Ted Padova. Yes, it is worth $25 to find out how to get the most out of a free product.

How to Do Everything with Adobe Acrobat 7 by Doug Sahlin. Good introduction to Acrobat.

Older But Still Valuable

Acrobat and Printing

The PDF Print Production Guide by Joseph Marin and Julie Shaffer. If you are a creative pro or run a print shop, you really need this one.

The Official Adobe Print Publishing Guide. A good how-to book. I have not seen the new edition.

The Acrobat 5 Master Class by Pattie Belle Hastings, Bjorn Akselsen and Sandee Cohen. Very insightful book for creative professionals and beautifully produced.

Electronic PDFs

The Official Adobe Electronic Publishing Guide. Beautiful primer on basic electronic PDFs.

Web Publishing with Acrobat/PDF by Thomas Mertz. This is an Acrobat 3 or 4 era book, but many of its “old fashioned” methods such as inserting PostScript files and PDFMarks into documents are still very useful.

Carl Young’s Adobe Acrobat 6 includes setting standards, my definitions for what makes a good onscreen PDF, and lots of best practices. The technical editor was Shlomo Perets of Microtype.

PDF Forms

Creating Adobe Acrobat Forms by Ted Padova.

Creating Adobe Acrobat Forms by John Deubert.

In spite of having identical names, these are quite different books. Padova’s book is a reference much like his Bible series. Deubert’s book is a great guide for getting started with PDF forms. Just remember that both of these were written in the Acrobat 5 era, and are somewhat dated.

So what do you think of this list? What are your suggestions for the books that should be on every Acrobat user’s shelf?

In the next posting I will take a look at online resources.

Welcome aboard. Before we set sail into the new world of AcrobatUsers.com blogs, let me introduce myself.

My name is Carl Young and I am an Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer trainer and consultant based in Phoenix. I am a certified technical trainer, certified expert in Acrobat versions 4-7 and Adobe FrameMaker 7. I also produce Carl Young’s PDF Conference and am the author of Carl Young’s Guide to Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional, published by McGraw Hill Osborne. (By the way, everything in the book still applies to Acrobat 7 Professional.)

I am primarily a Windows user, but I still have Mac. My wife, Jo Lou, runs the Phoenix Acrobat User Group. Although I live in Phoenix, a big chunk of my business is in Washington, D.C., where I train and consult with some of Adobe’s largest customers.

I also will be writing articles on PDF forms for AcrobatUsers.com. Keep an eye out for those in the next couple of months.

In this blog, we will discuss PDF forms (LiveCycle and Acrobat), general Acrobat resources, and some tips.

Here are the house rules: Although my E-mail is carl@pdftrain.com, please post your questions to the blog. In addition, please check the Acrobat Help file and Acrobat Support before posting. Take all installation issues to Acrobat Support. We won’t discuss those here.

Above all, please remember that all blogs on this site are run by volunteers who earn their livelihoods elsewhere. Do keep in mind we are not Adobe technical support.

I look forward to hearing from you.