Gimp Pocket Reference Author: Sven Neumann, Translated by Sven Riedel Pages: 97 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates ISBN: 1-56592-731-1 Summary: A handy guide offering a quick reference tour of the Gimp's features. Review Date: 29 December, 2003

Overview
Throughout the Open-source world, there are few applications that garner the distinction of being first in their class. The Gimp easily holds the distinction in the Open-Source world as the tool to use for photo and image manuipulation. Some would say it's a clear contender with Adobe's Photoshop in the proprietary world. O'Reilly's Gimp Pocket Reference offers a handy guide to the plethora of features available from this excellent tool.

What's in it?
The Gimp Pocket Reference basically offers a walk-through of all the features Gimp (version 1.2) has to offer. It begins with the toolbox (the small main window used by the Gimp) and goes through each menu item, each button, and each control at the bottom of the window, and offers a brief, but useful description of the function performed by each. When keyboard shortcuts are available for a given function, the book lists the corresponding key combination.

The next part of the book deals with the functionality available from the image window (the window that displays your images). This part of the book covers the features available from the image window itself, and then walks in order though each of the items available in the context menu available by right clicking on your image.

The book finishes with coverage of several miscellaneous topics, including setting preferences, explanation of the various resource (rc) files used by the Gimp, creating keyboard shortcuts, color modes, drawing and layer modes, and offers a compatibility matrix showing which major functionality is possible with the various file types supported by the Gimp.

What's good?
The book is comprehensive, and gives the reader a good overview of the broad range of features available in the Gimp. The discussion follows the layout of the interface, so if you're using the Gimp, and wondering about what a specific menu item or button does, the book makes it very easy to find what you're looking for.

What's not so good
As I mention above, mapping from a button or menu item to its corresponding functionality is made easy by the book. But if you have to go the opposite direction, and map from a given feature to the button or menu item to invoke it, then things are a bit more difficult, and that's my main gripe with the book. The book needs an index in the worst way. It would be ever so much more useful with one. As an example, someone on my local LUG mailing list recently asked about how to split an image into pieces. I jumped into the pocket reference to find how to access the "Guillotine" feature, but had to wade through many pages before I found it. An index probably could have helped substantially in my search.

Who will like it?
If you're a newby to the gimp, then you'll probably want to pick up something more along the lines of a tutorial or instruction book. This book will probably be a bit sparse for you, but will offer a nice overview of what's possible with the Gimp. If you're more familiar with the Gimp then you'll probably find this pocket reference useful to help you find just where that nifty feature was you stumbled across the other day (An index would make it that much batter though). If you're like me, you'll likely find some cool tips and tricks along the way as you read through the book. If you're a Photoshop user looking to come over to the Gimp, this book will probably be very helpful to get you acquainted and oriented with how things work in the Gimp.

Overall Rating: 8/10