Welcome to the latest edition of Connecting the Dots! In this series we search horizontally for the best resources that will deepen your understanding of local issues and events that affect you.
Innovator Steve Jobs once said that the only way you can 'connect the dots' is by looking backwards. We beg to differ.
We believe that it is possible to grasp and develop a perspective about the importance of changes happening around us, as we experience them. But we must be willing to be open to new ideas and experiences, even when they clash with our long-held beliefs and opinions.
In this edition: The Book of GIMP
In an earlier edition of Connecting the Dots! we reviewed a book, The Art of Community, that chronicles the evolution of community in our connected virtual worlds. One of the common themes in this evolution is collaborative consumption, the sharing of ideas, goods and services. Perhaps the most far reaching manifestation of this consumption is the open-source movement, where developers design software that can shared, and modified.
It would be only a matter of time before open-source developers created a powerful alternative to the proprietary, expensive and very popular Adobe Photoshop. That time is now. Enter GIMP - a free, full-featured cross-platform for manipulating photo images. While there is a full-fledged GIMP website replete with documentation in eleven languages, these training docs are skeletal compared to the powerful features of GIMP.
That's why No Starch Press' recent publication, The Book of GIMP, is such welcome news. Its tagline, A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything is no idle boast. This is a very hefty manual that covers a wide range of instructions: photo retouching, filters, animation, digital art, scripts, plug-ins and for those enterprising souls: customizing GIMP. Most of the illustrations are in color and there are plenty of screen shots to keep students of GIMP on track There are also instructions for installing GIMP on at least ten different platforms.
The Book of GIMP
Authors: Olivier Lecarme and Karine Delvare
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN: 978-1-59327-383-5
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