If you do not have alot of time in your day and a basic understanding of Illustrator this is perfect. Each tip is just that a tip. Half page explanation, easy way to do things.

Unlike a lot of Illustrator books, this doesn't describe the full range of functionality or offer lesson plans. Instead, it's a compendium of hints and shortcuts, many of which are those niggling little things that you wish you knew how to do, but can never seem to find in the bigger, more complete books.

I've bookmarked a lot of these nifty items: how to align items using one item as the "keystone"; selecting an object "hidden" by another object; and how to get that @&#*!$ knife tool to cut in a straight line. And there are many timesaving techniques and shortcuts, such as averaging and joining two points in one step. Not earthshattering, but a nice way to speed things up so you can spend more time on creative work.

I guess "photoshop Junkie" must be an incredibly experienced Illustrator user to know all the tips in this book. I've used Illustrator for around 5 years and there were lots of tips that I didn't know. Okay, I probably could have found many of them by searching around in the Help Files, but why bother when they're right there in the book?
There were enough tips in there for me to say it was worth the money. Why not 5 stars? Some of the graphics were not the greatest (although that really didn't affect the tips I guess, so I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could)

I do not agree with the 5-star reviewers of this title. If you have used Adobe Illustrator for more than, oh say 15 minutes, you probably know more than this book will teach you, and anything else can be found out by using the pull-down menu system, or the Help button.

Okay, maybe not fifteen minutes, but there is nothing here, no "hidden" tips and tricks. And if the creative value of this title were to be measured from 1 to 10, it would rate a minus 6.

I hear Dave's doing another book for CS2; however, if it's like all the other Kelby-clone titles, it will just be a rehash of this book with a few screen shots from the new application.

Save your money on this title, and treat yourself to a nice dinner.

I bought this book based on the wonderful customer reviews and was very disappointed. Most of the items can be easily found by anyone exploring the menu bar or palette options. In my opinion such things don't qualify as "hidden secrets," as the cover claims.

I did find one tip that I use (a keyboard command to reset the horizontal scale of type to 100%). It saves me, oh, a minute a month or so. At that rate the book will pay for itself in five years!