jolie S wrote: > Thomas, > > ...elision by Patrick... > > Akkana Peck's book is very good too. Just read it from the start and try to > do all the things she explains yourself. > I wanted to point out that even though I recommended Akkana's book myself in the last few days (I love the book), that there are other great books out there.
The first two books listed below are my favorites in no particular order--very complementary and highly recommend. You should have both. YOU SHOULD HAVE BOTH. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.--YOU SHOULD HAVE BOTH!!!! o Akkana Peck, "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional)" 2009. She is a mainstay on this list and others and helps people for free instead of telling them to buy the book. So buy the book! Support those who support free software (that means they support us!) o Michael J. Hammel's book, "The Artist's Guide to GIMP effects" 2009, is a brilliant book as well. He also posts to this list and is a wonderful guy. Buy his book too! o Klaus Goelker, "GIMP 2 for Photographers: Image Editing with Open Source Software (Paperback)" 2006 a translation from the German, I believe. I have this one but haven't been able to get through it for some reason. I keep going back to Peck and to Hammel. I suspect it's because it's a little out of date and I have to translate to 2.4+ in my head to make things work. Must be frustrating for an author to publish something and have fundamental changes in the software right after publishing. The next two aren't out yet: o Jason Von Gumster is writing the "GIMP Bible" due out 12 Jan 2010. There must be someone here reviewing it. Any opinions? Can we build up some pre-publishing buzz? I'm hoping for the format often seen in tech bibles, of a great tutorial first half followed by an equally great reference last half. o Daniel James is writing "Free Software for Creative People: Building Digital Media with Blender, GIMP, Scribus, Audacity, and More" due out about now. Anyone seen a review copy of it yet? A more specialized book: o Frederick L. Chipkin, "GIMP for Textile Design" 2008 covering the same material as his "Photoshop for Textile Design". I'd love to read it but hesitate to spend the money on something that seems a little specialized--but image manipulation is image manipulation, no? o There's the official documentation available with GIMP that's really good. It's also available bound as a book published this year. Everything else that I've found is years out of date. Of these I especially wish three were updated. They're all wonderful, but GIMP has changed enough so that the things that are no longer correct would hinder newbies more than helping them. o Sven's, "GIMP Pocket Reference" published by O'Reilly. Hey, it's Sven, if he doesn't know it it's not in GIMP! Covers 1.2 o Michael Hammel's, "Essential GIMP for Web Professionals". His Artist's guide from 1999 was recently updated and is one of my favorite two books on GIMP. It covers a lot about using GIMP for the web so I don't know if he has any plans to update this book. One thing that doesn't give me hope, is that the Essential GIMP for Web Professionals is part of a series, from Prentice Hall, and as far as I can see none of the other books in the series have been updated. Covers 1.2 o Carey Bunks, "Grokking the GIMP" (for those of you who haven't read Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", grokking means to understand completely by devouring--makes a lot of sense for books, no?) This is available as a book or a free download. I keep meaning to make alternate CSS for it because the brown background make my 54 year old eyes wish for more contrast. Wonderful book and amazing that it's been offered as a free download for so long. Covers 1.2 _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
