In PowerPoint 2010 Essential Training, author David Diskin demonstrates how to engage an audience with images, video, sound, charts, and diagrams in professional presentations. The course also covers a variety of methods to share presentations with others, and provides comprehensive tutorials on how to design presentations that successfully deliver a quality message. Exercise files accompany the course.

Bento is a personal database for Mac OS X Leopard that provides an organizational hub for anything a person might want to collect, track, or connect. Bento is designed for those with no previous database experience, and having database expert Cris Ippolite as a guide makes it easier to get the most from this unique program.

In Windows Phone 7 App Development First Look, Joe Marini introduces the concepts and techniques behind developing Silverlight-based applications for Windows Phone 7. This course enables developers to apply their existing Silverlight programming skills and learn the fundamentals of building and debugging applications with Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone 7. The development software and accompanying phone emulator give developers an early taste of how simple it is to create custom apps. Exercise files accompany the course.

In Excel 2010 Essential Training, Bob Flisser demonstrates the core features and tools in Excel 2010. The course introduces key Excel skills, shows how to utilize these skills with in-depth tutorials on Excel functions and spreadsheet formatting. It also covers prepping documents for printing, working with large worksheets and workbooks, collaborating with others, using Excel as a database, analyzing data, charting, and automating and customizing Excel. Exercise files are included with the course.

Web designers with no prior javascript experience can now easily add AJAX-driven functionality to their sites. Adobe Certified Master Instructor James Williamson demonstrates how in Dreamweaver CS4: Introduction to Spry. This course covers the three main focuses of Spry: creating interactive effects, using widgets to shape the user experience, and populating pages with data. Exercise files accompany the course. A working knowledge of HTML and CSS is recommended for this course.

A strong understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is vital to producing websites that look good, load quickly, and are easy to maintain. In The CSS Crash Course , published by SitePoint, Kevin Yank shows how CSS changes the way websites are designed. Whether the goal is to build a site from scratch or redesign an existing site, Kevin thoroughly explains how to use CSS to accomplish that goal, including how to create and modify a single CSS file to control the look of every page on a site.