While using Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign, did you ever find yourself manually repeating the same tasks and think there must be a better way? Perhaps you were even aware that actions existed in Photoshop, but were either too busy or too afraid to spend the time to learn them. The Designer's Apprentice was written to help get you started, and keep you going well down the road.

The techniques illustrated in The Designer's Apprentice were developed out of necessity by author Rick Ralston during his 15-year career as a graphics design professional with the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. The book was written out of his frustration with the lack of adequate documentation, and holistic discussion of graphics automation. The other problem was that most other documentation on the subject assumes you know more than what you do, or that if you are not an expert, you have no business working with this technology anyway.

The Designer's Apprentice is 252 pages, divided into 12 chapters, and three parts. I will break this down into the three parts; Automation Concepts, Tools, and Projects. The book focuses on three products: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, of which the author requests you be familiar with and have a good understanding of at least one of these. Most of the examples are posted at the Peachpit website.

Part I, "Concepts," begins by explaining what automation is and how we can find it in our everyday lives, right down to our beating hearts. The author defines automation as a set of editable commands a computer can execute to perform a task. You will learn you can use automation to do things like resize files, apply filters, apply copyrights, edit text, find and replace, merge data, and export data, as well as a whole host of other operations to include doing multiple tasks as a single item.

Part II, "Tools," will expose you to the tools available for automating Adobe Creative Suite. These include Actions, scripting, Automator (Mac), data-driven publishing, and server-based applications, as well as third party programs. With Actions, you can record and play back steps that perform an action. You can also halt and accept user input. Scripting comes in three flavors: AppleScript on Mac's only, JavaScript on Mac and PC, and VBScript on PC's only. Automator is the automation program that is built into Mac OS X operating system.