My favorite thing about Robin de Jongh's excellent new SketchUp book is the clever writing; I tend to like my technical reading to be entertaining, too. My favorite chapter title: "How To Collect An Arsenal Rambo Would Be Proud Of"
SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization is a treasure trove of information about making your SketchUp models look their best. Robin emphasizes a workflow that uses powerful but affordable tools (like Kerkythea and GIMP) for photo-rendering, but he also talks about creating better animations, using other Google tools for context modeling, adding entourage, matching photos and plenty more. Every time I open the book, I get sucked into reading another incredibly useful tip. It's definitely the most productive time-passer within arm's reach of my computer.
If you're an experienced SketchUp modeler, you owe it to yourself to pick up Robin's book. Your models will thank you.
The above is to the book on Amazon; here it is on the publisher's website.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
3 comments :
Not my favorite publisher...previous titles (there's a very similar one for Blender, and I've also read their book on Wordpress) have had about the worst-quality illustrations (like smudged, faded newspaper photos) I have ever encountered in a technical book. Packt also is notorious for not updating their title catalog as applications change, or for doing a decent job with editing. (For example, the Blender book's discussion on the topic of UV unwrapping was both out-of-date as far as the UI was concerned and partially repeated in successive, garbled chapters.) I've been led to believe that Packt prints-on-demand, so these sort of flaws are even more inexplicable.
I'd stick with Aidan's own book, or Chris Grover's Missing Manual.
Post One.
Second book in less than a month! The theme is good!
Just as the criticism of Lewis Wadsworth on Packt Publishing, I see that this book, Packt has bothered to put the color images, (many, nay, almost all books about SketchUp is black / white) but not concerned with the quality of the image posted in the book.
The font and formatting used also was not very good. This certainly is bad, because who it hurts is the author of the book (Robin de Jongh) and not the publisher.
Post two.
I made a comment on another post about the book Real World Google SketchUp 7
Wanted you to talk about other books, such as: Google SketchUp
and SketchUp Pro 7 Bible (Kelly L. Murdock), Google SketchUp Cookbook (Bonnie Roskam), and others as the book by Chris Grover, Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual.
I wonder what the public that every book is intended, (advanced, basic, ...) and a brief opnion his of each.
Thank you Mr. Chopra.
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