The book I read and that I will be reviewing today is Sams
Teach Yourself Flickr® in 10 Minutes published by Sams Publisher. The author is
Steve Holzner, an award winning author in the field of science and tech books.
The book is sorted into 10 lessons with each lesson having subsections. The book
goes step by step through Flickr which is a photo and video sharing website,
web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004.
The book is about Flickr and how to use it from start to
finish. Don’t let the title mislead you, you can’t read this book in 10 minutes
but the general idea is that it takes 10 minutes to learn how to use Flickr. He
goes in depth about every aspect of Flickr in this book. By the time you get to
the end, he provides troubleshooting tips and a Q&A session so you don’t read
the whole book and then still have questions.
Anyone who loves taking photos or shooting videos will love
Flickr. Flickr also has a public library of photos that you can search from, so
if you just want to look at other peoples photos you can. I recommend Flickr
for anyone interested in these things.
I found this book very helpful as I knew nothing about
Flickr except that you could upload photos onto it. I didn’t realize it was so
much more than just that. It’s a community that comes together to share photos,
videos, and more. You can also edit photos, a feature I had no clue Flickr had.
This book went step-by-step through every aspect of Flickr and going in-depth
on each feature that Flickr has. From signing up, to uploading photos, to editing
photos, working with videos, and troubleshooting any problems you have.
Flickr is a lot like another web 2.0 application that I’m
sure most of you are familiar with, Photobucket. Photobucket is pretty much
virtually the same in many aspects as Flickr. They both have public photos you
can view and both have photo editing software. The main difference between the
two is that Flickr is for sharing and networking, where Photobucket is for
image storing.
The strong points of this book are simple. You will know how
to use Flickr after reading it even if you are computer illiterate, people who
don’t know anything about computers will even know how to use Flickr. It
literally goes step-by-step on how to signup, upload, and use Flickr. I can’t
really find any weak points in this book. It’s hard to when it does everything
it was meant to do, teach someone how to use Flickr. I know if I just say that
this book has no weak points it’s not very helpful but if I had to just add
some criticism I would say that it was indeed boring and it felt more like a
long tutorial rather than a book if that makes sense.
In conclusion, I have learned a lot about Flickr that I didn’t
know before. I had no problems following the steps that the book laid out and
it even had a Q&A section for any questions that I had. I recommend this
book only if you want to know how to use Flickr without having to figure it out
yourself. I enjoyed reading this book and I hope you choose to check it out.
