I saw a few book reviews of Syncfusion's Succinctly series by other GWB bloggers and have also received emails from Syncfusion asking if I wanted to write a review for them. Below is my review of the free ebook PDF Succinctly by Ryan Hodson, although I was approached by Syncfusion the review below is all of my own opinion.
The book PDF Succinctly is written in a concise manner, being only 60 pages long it makes reading this technical book an easy and quick task. I was impressed by how the book got straight into the topic of creating a PDF file after a short overview. This was the main reason why I wanted to read the book. As an example of how concise this book about PDF is, by page 20 you are already shown how to create a simple PDF document. Although this book is concise it does contain a some advanced topics about PDF such as in Chapter 4 and 5 where you are shown how to add vector graphics and navigation elements to a PDF document.
I also like how all the external references such as links to open source libraries and source code are clearly stated in the book. Many times when reading a technical book you often struggle to find where you can download a resource used in the book, this was not the case when I read PDF Succinctly.
My only critique about the book is that the downloadable source code could do with more advanced examples, there were only 2 examples in the source code provided.
Here is my summary of the topics in the PDF Succintly book.
- Chapter 1 contains an overview of the structure of a PDF document.
- Chapter 2 takes you through the steps of creating a simple PDF document using a utility program called pdftk from PDF Labs.
- Chapter 3 details how text in a PDF document can be manipulated using text operators.
- Chapter 4 shows how vector graphics can be added to a PDF document using graphics operators.
- Chapter 5 details how a document outline (navigation element in the form of a tree), hyperlinks and text annotations can be added to a PDF document.
- Chapter 6 shows how you can dynamically generate a PDF using C# with the help of an open-source PDF library called iTextSharp.
All references I found relating to the book are below.
http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal
http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks/pdf
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/files/itextsharp/