SUMMARY: How to Learn FrameMaker, part 1

[Gail Bernstein <gailbernstein -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>]

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my question about how to learn
FrameMaker if you need a lower budget alternative to face-to-face classes.
Lots of useful responses. Here they are, organized into readings, learning
by doing/tutorials, and other.

Thanks!
Gail

READINGS

A nice after market book I found is "The Frame Handbook" by Branagan and
Sierra, O'Reilly
and Associates, pub.

I recommend the book "The Frame Handbook". This helped me immensely when I
first started to use Frame.

Without training, I think the best way is to run through Adobe's Classroom
in a Book for FrameMaker 5.5 and then to tackle a project with the new
software, being certain to have the reference manual and online resources,
such as the FrameMaker forum (
http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/custsupport/forums.html )at hand.

Adobe offers the Classroom in a Book series, which is what EEI used as a
textbook in the training that I attended. Very comprehensive, comes with a
CD making the lessons interactive.

I've been following this discussion. I would recommend the Classroom in a
Book FrameMaker text w/CD. I got a copy from amazon.com. I was starting to
learn Frame from ground zero. This book will get you up to speed on the
basics.

I read the User Guide that comes with the full version. I also bought
Classroom in a Book from Adobe and found it quite useful. It's 300 plus
pages of tutorial and comes with a CD of all the practice files you need.

Gail, I basically learned FrameMaker with the help of a book called Adobe
FrameMaker Classroom in a Book.  It comes with a CD full of exercises and
really is very good.  I later went for the formal "face-to-face" course,
but by
that time it was a complete waste of time and money, as they were not able
to
teach me anything new.  As a matter of fact - they used that same book in
their
course.

I don't know what 3rd party books are available, but if you learn by
reading documentation, and can get a copy of "Using FrameMaker 5.x" before
Adobe edited the guts out of it, you can probably get most of what you need
from there.  If you're familiar with the principles of typography and any
other desktop publishing software, the conceptual leaps will probably not
be out of reach.

I learned FrameMaker in the very early days by <*gasp> reading the manual.
At that time there were many fewer features than there are now, but the
basic concepts and philosophy were already established.

I realize that it's a bit different now, to plow through everything that's
part of Frame, but I think the easiest way to absorb it is to understand
the basic paradigm:  that document design is based on page styles,
paragraph styles, and character styles, and it's best to create documents
from established templates rather than making local changes.  In other
words, to treat Frame primarily as a document design tool with text
processing capabilities, rather than expecting it to function as a word
processor that also lets you format pages.

End of part one.

Gail S. Bernstein
Contract Technical Writer
(303) 832-5123
gailbernstein -at- earthlink -dot- net

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