A few days back, I started reading Damien’s Mastering Adobe Captivate 6 book. I would say that it’s a great resource for people who wish to learn and master Adobe Captivate 6. It’s a comprehensive guide to help you create your eLearning course from start to end, and covers everything from pre-production to publishing stage.

Here are some of the striking features of this book:

• I like the way Damien sets the context right at the start of the book, that if you are creating an eLearning course, you are playing a role of a teacher, and not a developer or a programmer, and people who take your eLearning courses are students, and not users. Here’s what he says: “You and your audience are united by a very special kind of relationship: a student to teacher relationship.”
• As a learning professional, I felt really comfortable when Damien reiterated the fact that getting the pedagogical approach right is the single most important thing before you start building your course using any authoring tool. He actually has a complete section in the book where he talks about the details you need to get straight before you start developing your course in Captivate.
• The best way to learn how to use an authoring tool is by learning through the experiences of the fellow users and Damien has done a great job of introducing Captivate community experts to the readers. As a reader, it made me feel assured that, in case, I have any questions or get stuck somewhere, I have the community experts just a tweet or a post away. He takes absolute care to introduce you to the community experts and provides you all the details you require to get in touch with them.
• He describes the steps in great detail and covers the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ aspect of using the features. And to make things even better for the readers, he has provided links to download the exercise files which you can use and follow along the steps.
• He has taken great care to include the new features of Captivate 6 as a part of his book, so that you don’t miss out on what’s new in the latest version.
• And last but not the least, he has added a lot of tips and notes for the readers, including links to websites and blog posts for reference.

All in all, if you’re getting started with Captivate, Damien’s book is a good place to start your journey.

Happy captivating! 🙂