Posted by Mike Jackson on October 29, 2003
Hello Keepers of the Craft!
Every once in a while you run across a product or service that lives up to its billing and hype. A couple of years ago, I upgraded my web page building software from Adobe Page Mill to Adobe GoLive. Unfortunately, the new program had absolutely nothing in common with the old one, and I was forced to have to learn GoLive almost from the ground up. Worse yet, the GoLive manual was written for a much more advanced user than me, so nothing even started to make sense and it never seemed to be in any sort of meaningful linear order.
After searching around on the Internet for additional training sites, I ran across Lynda.com and was able to view a few of their sample video clips. I went ahead and paid $149 for the two CD set and have been totally pleased with their product. It is well done, thorough, and quite inclusive for such a complicated program.
I've probably buried my lead story here, so far. Lynda.com offers similar training CDs for Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Corel Painter and a host of other programs. I've watched several of the other sample training clips on other programs and they look equally well done.
Okay! The CDs sell for around $149 per set. I had 14 hours of training in the GoLive CD and it looks similar on the others. I like being able to go back and watch clips to relearn techniques, tools, and commands I forgot a week or two later.
AND...Lynda.com offers a subscription option. For $25 per month (cancel anytime) you can view ANY clip from any program as many times as you want. If you have a fairly fast connection, the clips play great. Since I needed the GoLive information, I bought it, but the $25 per month gives you a TON of information at your fingertips and time of the day. You could pay for one month and view enough of any of the CD sets to determine which ones you might want to actually buy.
I am not getting anything to mention their products...I just believe they deliver on their promises and are well worth the money. Now that days are short, fishing is getting tougher to do, and snow is falling, I will probably spend my $25 for a few months. That is CHEAP training!
I have been using GoLive exclusively for this site now for quite a while. The left navigation bar is an example of the power of the program. That bar is on every page...now getting close to 50 pages. When I update the left navigation bar component, it automatically updates every page it is associated with. The update takes only seconds, versus the time it would take me to manually change all 50 pages.
http://www.lynda.com/
Mike Jackson - co-host
Robin Sharrard
Thanks for the info and the link...I've been looking for help with Painter 8 and this looks like the solution. Robin
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads