Adobe InDesign, 2nd Edition: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features

Adobe InDesign, 2nd Edition: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features is a practical, classroom-style guide to one of the most widely used page layout applications in professional publishing. Built around a structured course plus a deeper reference section, it gives readers a clear path from setup and typography into frames, styles, long-document features, tables, output, and more.

The strength of this book is its balance. The course moves step by step through real layout tasks, while the compendium keeps the most important InDesign concepts easy to revisit later. That makes it useful both as a learning book and as a desk-side reference when a project gets more complicated than expected.

Learn InDesign Through Real Production Tasks

Rather than treating InDesign as a list of menus and commands, the book organizes its material around the kind of work designers actually do: setting up documents, managing text, controlling styles, placing images, and keeping multi-page layouts organized. The result is a more grounded way to learn the software—one that connects the tools to finished pages.

• Workspace setup and preferences
• Typography, text frames, and styles
• Frames, images, and object styles
• Find/Change and scripts
• Long-document tools such as tables of contents and cross-references
• Brochure-building and troubleshooting projects

A Reference You Can Return To

As the title suggests, this is more than a beginner’s tutorial. The compendium section gives the book staying power after the lessons are complete, making it a useful companion for anyone who wants to build confidence in Adobe InDesign over time.

Well Suited For

This edition will appeal to designers, students, instructors, and working creatives who need a structured guide to page layout and production-ready publishing workflows. If you want a book that teaches InDesign by doing, this one is designed with that exact goal in mind.