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.
