David Busch's Nikon D5000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography
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David Busch's Nikon D5000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography Details
About the Author With more than a million books in print, David D. Busch is the world's #1 selling digital camera guide author, and the originator of popular digital photography series like David Busch's Pro Secrets and David Busch's Quick Snap Guides. He has written more than a dozen hugely successful guidebooks for Canon and Canon digital SLR models, as well as many popular books devoted to dSLRs, including Mastering Digital SLR Photography, Second Edition, and Digital SLR Pro Secrets. As a roving photojournalist for more than twenty years, he illustrated his books, magazine articles, and newspaper reports with award-winning images. He's operated his own commercial studio, suffocated in formal dress while shooting weddings-for-hire, and shot sports for a daily newspaper and upstate New York college. His photos and articles have appeared in Popular Photography & Imaging, The Rangefinder, The Professional Photographer, and hundreds of other publications. He has also reviewed dozens of digital cameras for CNet and Computer Shopper, and his advice has been featured in National Public Radio's "All Tech Considered." When About.com named its top five books on Beginning Digital Photography, debuting at the #1 and #2 slots were Busch's Digital Photography All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies and Mastering Digital Photography. During the past year, he's had as many as five of his books listed in the Top 20 of Amazon.com's Digital Photography Bestseller list--simultaneously! Busch's 120-plus other books published since 1983 include bestsellers like David Busch's Quick Snap Guide to Digital SLR Lenses. Visit his website at http://www.dslrguides.com. Read more
Reviews
The book is more readable than the manual that comes with the camera, but the first three chapters of the book do not lend themselves to sequential reading. This part of the book proceeds button-by-button and menu item-by-menu item, instead of by function, making it easy to get disoriented. I sometimes found myself wondering "Did I already read about this, or not?"For instance, selecting a metering method is on p. 25-26, but choosing a metering method is on p. 171-175. If you want to know what to do with the camera's histograms, you will need to look on p. 50-51, p. 74, and p. 187-190. Manual focus had me flipping back and forth between p. 115 and p. 203. Too much flipping pages needed.It would be helpful if there were pictures in the text of the menu and button icons. After all, one can assume that someone who spends the money to buy this camera is probably visually oriented! It is tiresome to repeatedly flip back 3 or 4 pages to find the photo of a menu, so I can keep the icons straight.Actually, my guess is that much of the book had the author copying and pasting boilerplate text from his earlier books, a which I felt was confirmed when he mentioned how Canon manages a particular issue without saying how Nikon does it. (Unfortunately, I cannot relocate this page, and obviously the Canon reference is not in the index.)The second half of the book, was extremely readable, and the information was presented in logical order. The chapter on lenses was quite helpful; you need to read this chapter early, before buying any additional lenses, and preferably before you even decide which kit lens to get. Because of this chapter, I finally understand what is going on with the crop factor in this camera. The section on external lighting, however, was neither specific to the D5000, nor even relevant to most owners of an entry-level D-SLR. (It is one of my boilerplate suspects.)Chapter 9 also has useful suggestions about keeping track of which batteries and memory cards are and are not ready for use.