Deke McLelland wrote a tutorial book on InDesign CS2. Actually, it’s a real course with the author addressing the reader as if he were there with you in the room, looking over your shoulder as you go through his chapters.

This O’Reilly book is a real course in InDesign, meaning it will teach you from A to Z what you need to know with regards to desktop publishing with InDesign. The book starts at the very basics, like what the difference is between picas and points.

Each chapter goes a bit deeper into the power of InDesign, with on almost every page a so-called “Pearl of Wisdon” — small paragraphs of text that you could call power tips. In my opinion, I thought McLelland focussed a bit too much on InDesign’s graphics tools. After all, this application is a layout program foremost. But perhaps the author is right to pay so much attention to these tools as they form an important part of the application’s toolbox.

Towards the end of the book you will not only have learned about creating graphics and basic paragraph styling, but also about XML, long documents and of course PDF, printing, and everything else there is to know about working with InDesign CS2.

The book contains a DVD-rom with a Total Training sample on InDesign CS2. I actually find this better than what other publishers usually do: to provide only the traditional sample projects that go with the chapters. It’s nice to see Deke McLelland explain to you how it all works.