CorelDRAW : The Official Guide

This is the first time i'm reviewing a course reference book. Well never done CorelDRAW all my life so now that it is in my course, i had to do something. So, i searched Amazon and came across this book because i knew only attending class would do me no good where i can only learn something from here and something from there so i decided to get the book (i know version X5 is out in the market now but i had already downloaded X4 so i decided to get this X4 guide to go through with it and it was the best decision of my life.

The author (oh i owe him so much), Gary David Bouton has used CorelDRAW professionally for more than 15 years and is the author of five books covering previous versions. He was a 1992 finalist in the CorelDRAW World Design Contest. A former advertising agency art director, Gary has received four international awards in design and desktop publishing and has written several guides on digital graphics covering the fields of photography, special effects, video editing, and 3D modeling.

The book is concise and covers all facets of the software in very good detail and with numerous example illustrations. The author understands very well to highlight each feature an make it interesting and innovative enough to set this book apart from the actual manual.

The book contains hundreds of tips and techniques and spans from basic information like how to customize the user interface over an eight-page shortcutsguide all the way to various lens and transparency effects with a full-color insert. (The remainder of the book is printed in B&W.)

He highlights the power of exciting effects such as blends, contours, distortions, and drop shadows and helps to create animations and use Web-relateddocument properties.

Even the DTP functions of CorelDraw (i.e. write text to paths and objects, and support text in multiple languages) are covered in depth and some examples show nicely the capability of the software while sparking ideas. Of course bitmap commands, vector drawing tools, effect presets, and many more things are covered on the 928 pages as well. 

The book is our handbook to the most feature-filled drawing application you could hope for, and as you’d rightly expect, the chapters contain comprehensive explanations of what tools, pop-up menus, commands, dockers, and other elements do. But the prize in this book is that you’ll learn not only the value of the features, but also what they’re good for—how each tool, command, option, and feature can be used to best serve a design problem you want to solve. Knowledge is fine—you can get facts from Wikipedia and around every corner on the Web, the bookstore, and your friends and family. When you put facts to use, however, you eventually gain skill you can tap into in the future, build upon, and eventually your knowledge becomes wisdom—something an ambitious, expressive designer has an affinity for— right up there with water and oxygen.

This book is divided into eight parts plus an appendix listing keyboard shortcuts that’ll

speed up your work in CorelDRAW. As you might expect, the parts follow a progression, from

a very basic introduction to later chapters that delve into special effects and even photo editing. If you’re the type of reader who likes to begin at the beginning and make a linear voyage to finish at the appendix, you won’t be surprised. However, the chapters are structured and fairly compartmentalized to address a specific topic; if you want fast solutions for specific areas within CorelDRAW, you can also “pick and choose.” One of the wonderful things about books is that you can skip ahead and rewind—just as you do with DVD movies!

This guide for using CorelDraw is an extremely well written book for a beginner with CorelDraw. It is very comprehensive. It is organized well enough so that even if you are not familiar with any special jargon, you can find the drawing functions that you are looking for quite easily.

CorelDRAW : The Official Guide