Customer Rating: 
Summary: Best Adobe Tutor
Comment: This is my textbook for a communtiy college class on Adobe Illustrator and it is a great book. I can go back and redo the lessons and get it!! I am a visual learner and this book is really a great tutorial. I am having fun in the class but missed two lessons and caught up on my own with the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource for Learning Illustrator
Comment: While it doesn't cover any of the new features in CS3, this is an excellent guide to get your feet wet in Illustrator. It includes step-by-step instructions and leads you gradually through all the basic features of the software.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent tool for beginners
Comment: I bought this book for my husband to learn Illustrator (and also the companion book for photoshop). It is an excellent tool to teach the basics of illustrator, especially for someone who has never used the program before. It's not meant for people already familiar with the program but BEGINNERS, and it does a great job. I would highly recommend it to someone who wants to learn the basics. If you do the chapter work, you will learn Illustrator.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: a great book for learning Illustrator
Comment: I have worked through every page and exercise in both this book and the official Adobe "Classroom in a Book" for Illustrator CS2. Chris Botello's book (this one) is far better in my opinion. Chris covers features, topics, and techniques that the official book completely ignores (gradient meshes, as one of many possible examples). I suppose the official book may have a couple of very minor things that this book doesn't, but no book like this is completely encompassing. This book certainly comes closer to giving a fuller picture of what you can do in Illustrator than the official book.
While I find that some of the comments in other reviews below to be exaggerated, I do agree that a very small amount of the instruction text in just a couple of the particular steps of only a few of the tons of exercises could be worded better, but it's far from incomprehensible. Just a tiny amount of thinking and experimentation reveals the "why" of any step you may find baffling. I might even suggest that if this simple book befuddles you, maybe Illustrator isn't right for you altogether. No one will be holding your hand when you are doing *real* work with Illustrator.
Think of my 4 start rating as more of a 4-and-a-half star rating. I would have given the book 5 stars if it had been in full-color and included a CD. A very small number of the examples refer to a color you should be seeing in the accompanying picture, but the whole book is in black-and-white. That isn't really a big deal, since it's always obvious what the text is referring to. About the CD: while I'm sure it was a smart, cost-efficient solution for the publisher, including a CD with the book's example files would have been nice. As it is, you must download the examples from the publisher's website. Still, that isn't really a problem.
So, for greater exposure to what Illustrator CS2 does and how to do it, I highly recommend this book. It covers many features, has lots of exercises, and it has better-than-what-some-people-would-have-you-believe explanations for everything. It is worth spending time with.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Easiest learning book I've ever used.
Comment: This text was bought for an art class for graphic design project production. At the time, I didn't know anything about Illustrator other than using the pen tool and some basic shapes and whatnot. While I haven't used many other references for Illustrator, this would have to be THE book I recommend for learning Illustrator. It goes through and systematically teaches you everything you need to know to be a mid to high level user of Illustrator CS2. If that's what you want to be, this book is for you.
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