There is a tradition from my childhood—which seems to have gone away in recent years—but that I’d like to restore with this book. It’s called the “Prize in Every Box”; remember when you bought a box of candy or cereal and there was a bonus—something really cool inside you didn’t expect?

CorelDRAW X4: The Official Guide is your handbook to the most feature-filled drawing application you could hope for, and as you’d rightly expect, the chapters contain comprehensive explanations of what tools, pop-up menus, commands, dockers, and other elements do. But the prize in this book is that you’ll learn not only the value of the features, but also what they’re good for—how each tool, command, option, and feature can be used to best serve a design problem you want to solve. Knowledge is fine—you can get facts from Wikipedia and around every corner on the Web, the bookstore, and your friends and family. When you put facts to use, however, you eventually gain skill you can tap into in the future, build upon, and eventually your knowledge becomes wisdom—something an ambitious, expressive designer has an affinity for—right up there with water and oxygen.

This book is divided into eight parts plus an appendix listing keyboard shortcuts that’ll speed up your work in CorelDRAW. As you might expect, the parts follow a progression, from a very basic introduction to later chapters that delve into special effects and even photo editing. If you’re the type of reader who likes to begin at the beginning and make a linear voyage to finish at the appendix, you won’t be surprised. However, the chapters are structured and fairly compartmentalized to address a specific topic; if you want fast solutions for specific areas within CorelDRAW, you can also “pick and choose.” One of the wonderful things about books is that you can skip ahead and rewind—just as you do with DVD movies!