Product: Visual Quickstart Guide: QuarkXPress 7 for Windows and Macintosh Publisher: Peachpit Press, www.peachpit.com ISBN: 0-3211-35827-9 Pages: 464 Price: $29.99 US Level: All who use QuarkXPress Rating: 5 out of 5 apples

The book subtitle says it all: "Learn QuarkXPress the Quick and Easy Way!" If you've never picked up a Visual Quickstart Guide, you've been missing a lot. This series makes anything and everything they cover easy to learn. The abundance of graphics are very useful to the visual learner. Looking at a graphic in the book lets you compare it to your computer�s, to quickly know where you are and what to do.

QuarkXPress 7 is a very complicated desktop publishing program. When Quark touted 160 new features in that version, I knew I was going to need much help to get up and running — enter VQG, to the rescue. The authors, Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas manage to make their writing styles collaborate seamlessly. Both are teachers who show an unmistakable ease of transferring complicated concepts into easy to understand language.

They quote the definition of Quark from the Oxford Dictionary. However, I like the one given in the Wikipedia better, "In particle physics, quarks are one of the two basic constituents of matter (the other is the lepton). Quarks are the only fundamental particles that interact through all four of the fundamental forces." Could QuarkXPress conquer beyond the four forces? Yes, indeed. It is a central constituency for gathering the 'forces' for text, photographs, graphics, and tables.

The new features in QuarkXPress 7 are marked NEW in bold and in the margins of the book, making it easy to quickly glean the new features. The Table of Contents and the Index are very good and very well laid out, but do not flag NEW features.

I reviewed the QuarkXPress 7 application , and found it difficult to clearly state what selecting �Item Knocks Out Drop Shadow� meant. I found the perfect words in this book: "If checked, the drop shadow won't be visible behind areas of an item that have an opacity of less than 100%." Now why couldn't I have said that? I wrote: "Selecting Item Knocks Out Drop Shadow controls whether you see the shadow through the object or not." Mine neglects to mention that the item has to be less than 100% opacity.

For QuarkXPress users who have never experienced any of the Visual Quickstart Guides, this one belongs in your personal library. For those who are familiar with and use QuarkXPress regularly, this book cuts to the chase and clearly explains how to use the NEW features in QuarkXPress 7.