I found it demoralizing that every lesson in this books starts with the words, "This lesson will take about an hour to complete." Have they ever tested this claim on real people? For example, in one single lesson -- I'm looking at Chapter 5 -- you will learn: (1.) how to retouch peoples' faces, make their eyes look bigger, turn a frown into a smile, banish red-eye, and adjust other facial features, (2.) how to create bokeh or the appearance of motion in a photo by fine-tuning the various types of "blur" available in the filters menu, (3.) how to stitch together multiple photos to create a panorama, and then fill in the blank spaces with "content-aware" imagery generated by Photoshop, (4.) how to crop and straighten images, and again, fill in the blank areas with context-sensitive content, (5.) how to correct distortion caused by short-angle lenses and fix other lens-related issues, (6.) how to take two photos with different depths of field, then line them up and merge them into one photo so that everything is in focus from back to front, (7.) how to turn a small group of ducks into a flock of ducks, or a few flowers into a field of flowers, by learning to "seamlessly" move, copy, rotate, and resize individual parts of a photo, (8.) how to combine a photo of a train taken at one angle with a photo of a bridge taken at another angle, and use the perspective tools to make it look like the train is actually coming right over the bridge at you... It's all great stuff, and 100% worth your while to learn, but name one person on this earth who could learn all that in an hour, including completing all the steps with the lesson files.The Adobe Classroom books are expensive, but not compared to the cost of a CC subscription that you don't use. If you are the kind of person who can sit down and plow through a book from beginning to end, there is nothing better. Except for the unrealistic time estimates, the books were obviously written by people with real experience in pedagogy, with one lesson building on the next, no missing steps, and lots of little forays into advanced topics so you know what you might want to explore further. DON'T buy this book if you aren't going to download the lesson files and do the lessons, because the book is about those files and those lessons. Believe me, reading about how to use vector-drawing tools to trace a photo and create a reusable logo from it is very different from actually creating the paths, subtracting one path from another, converting the paths into shapes, turning shapes into assets, saving color schemes along with your assets, and all the rest. Not for the faint of heart. Good luck.