What a great idea: a book that lists all of Shake’s many tabs, nodes, views, and functions. And all in a small book the size of a pocket book. Unfortunately, Peachpit Press made the unhappy decision to make the book so small that you can hardly read some of the text next to the many screenshots.

Screenshots of Shake 4 interface elements. That’s roughly the description of this quick reference guide. The idea is excellent: you take a screenshot of every single Shake 4 element, add some explanation next to it, or in tables, and you have a reference guide that every Shake operator can readily use.

Damian Allen must have felt the need to be able to refer to such a guide. Otherwise he would never have thought of making one like this. Unfortunately, Allen seems not to have had much influence on the size of the book. Granted, if you turn this into a regular size training book, you get a very thin course-like result.

But as it is now, I can’t even read much of the text next to most screenshots with my glasses on, let alone when I take them off. Luckily though, much of the information has also been presented in tables. The book is divided into sections using a thumbnail indexer that resembles the tabs across Apple’s web site. Nice.