Digital Media Tools by Nigel Chapman and Jenny Chapman from Wiley Publishing is one of Wiley’s many educational books aimed at university level courses. This book includes chapters about Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator and Premiere. It doesn’t attempt to create expert users, but covers the basics of what each program does and how to use it. It would be a good text for an overview course or an introductory course.
An unusual characteristic of this book is that it covers two versions of each program. In this second edition from 2002 (the third edition is scheduled for 2005) the Dreamweaver chapters cover Dreamweaver 4 and Dreamweaver MX in two separate chapters. There is a chapter for Illustrator 9 and Illustrator 10, and similar inclusiveness for the other software. This seems like an excellent idea to me, since colleges and universities are always struggling to adopt new software versions and may have periods when everything hasn’t been upgraded yet. Since this single book would have to get you through six different applications in a digital media course, having some extra options as to the software included in the book makes a lot of sense.
The book weighs in at over 600 pages and does not include a CD. Additional materials are provided at digitalmultimedia.org, which also features materials for another book by the same authors, Digital Multimedia. There are some very good suggestions for projects in the book, some of which require integration of more than one of the tools included to complete.