The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick [Hardcover]

Michael Still (Author)

Price:	CDN$ 71.50 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want it delivered Monday, May 28? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.

Product Details

Hardcover: 360 pages
Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (Dec 20 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1590595904
ISBN-13: 978-1590595909
Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 18.4 x 2.9 cm
Shipping Weight: 821 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #539,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Book Description

Purchase this book and you’ll get the completely searchable eBook for free—a $25 value!

This book should be useful to any programmer interested in making the most of ImageMagick's capabilities, and that is not just because it is the only ImageMagick book on the market.

— Michael J. Ross, Web developer/Slashdot contributor

The sheer weight of helpful content makes this an invaluable purchase for Linux users at all levels.

— Paul Hudson, Linux Format

An open source project backed by years of continual development, ImageMagick supports over 90 image formats and can perform impressive operations such as creating images from scratch; changing colors; stretching, rotating, and overlaying images; and overlaying text on images. Whether you use ImageMagick to manage the family photos or to embark on a job involving millions of images, this book will provide you with the knowledge to manage your images with ease.

The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick explains all of these capabilities and more in a practical, learn-by-example fashion. Youll get comfortable using ImageMagick for any image-processing task. Through the books coverage of the ImageMagick interfaces for C, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, youll learn how to incorporate ImageMagick features into a variety of applications.

About the Author

Michael Still released his first open source project in July 2000 and has been actively developing ever since. He has had a variety of articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, and once made a tux out of fairy lights! He is the author of the recently published The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Apress, 2005). Michael grew up in Canberra, Australia, and now works for Google and lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife and two kids. Michael is a past committee member of AUUG, Linux Australia, and the linux.conf.au 2005 committee.

Inside This Book (Learn More)

Explore More
Concordance

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Share your experience with this product with others

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com ^(beta)

Amazon.com: 3.3 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

56 of 57 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Better than nothing, but disappointing, Jan 5 2006

By Tev Kaber - Published on Amazon.com

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Hardcover)

ImageMagick is an extremely powerful, free, command-line image editor that has been around a while and is the preferred tool of many for dynamically creating images for the web. However, like many open-source projects, ImageMagick's weakness has always been poor documentation.

So I was excited when I saw there was finally a guide to ImageMagick, and ordered the book hot off the presses.

I have to say, though, I'm disappointed.

I was hoping for a book with a good command reference, tips and tricks, sample uses, and that sort of thing. Instead, it is a very basic introduction to ImageMagick.

The book is very graphical in nature, with about 75% of virtually every page filled by an image, and only a little text. The images, while a little useful, are probably larger than they need to be, and almost seem to be filler making up for the lack of text. They are also all black and white images, which makes them in some cases useless (i.e. "Figure 6-29. Alcatraz with varying levels of hue" depicts 4 essentially identical images - without color, you can't tell that one has less hue than another). For a book of this price, I would expect color photos.

As a result, the book feels very sparse, with little information on each page.

The last few chapters, which show code examples of how to use ImageMagick in several popular programming languages, are more in line with the sort of practical examples I was expecting, although this section feels short.

So overall, a decent *introduction* to ImageMagick, but I think calling it "Definitive" is a bit undeserved. It is the only game in town though, since for some reason no one else has written a book on ImageMagick. If you have already used ImageMagick, this book is only marginally useful.

I'll have to keep hoping O'Reilly does one, and does it right.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing. Needs Color & more emphasis on Perl & APIs, Jan 18 2006

By Walter Higgins - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Hardcover)

This was disappointing. The emphasis of the book is on the ImageMagick commandline tools rather than the APIs. There are a lot of photographs but they're all black and white. The before and after samples are worse than useless - they just take up space. It's probably not the Author's fault.

Apress (the publishers) should really have done this book properly and included glossy color pages where needed. As it stands, it's impossible to tell from looking at the before-and-after photos in the book, what most of the image operations are supposed to do. This is just cheap on the part of the publishers.

Stick to the online imagemagick tutorials and give this book a miss.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice Introduction To ImageMagick, Jun 7 2006

By Daniel McKinnon "Dan" - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick (Hardcover)

'The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick' by Michael Still is a nice guide which covers an extremely powerful set of tools that is lacking in documentation. Note that I say the word 'nice' and not GREAT. I wanted this to be great, I truly did. I use ImageMagick on a nearly daily basis and while I thought I knew I knew the ins and outs of this application pretty well, I was hoping that I could get some more out of this book, the only one of its kind on the market that I knew of.

Problem #1 NO COLOR IMAGES!!!!

How can you have a guide that covers manipulating and using images and provide no color examples when there are tons of other books the get away from the 3 colors of white, black and grey?? I realize that this was a decision made by the higher ups at Apress and it's a bad, bad, bad decision

Problem #2 At just over 300 pages and with some images (again, black and white) and cover nearly and entire page in size, this guide is certainly not DEFINITIVE. If you want to make a definitive guide, you need to have more content, more content, more content. More like 'An Introduction to ImageMagick' would be the more appropriate title.

If you are new to ImageMagick and want to see what can be done, this is a handy guide but any power users won't get a lot out of this book. The examples are handy, but the decision to have no color photos really hurts this text even as an introduction to the technology. Apress, you want some advice for version 2??? Get out the Crayola box!!

**** RECOMMENDED

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 6 reviews 3.3 out of 5 stars