As its title suggests, this book attempts to cover most common aspect of digital photography. The cover of this book, proudly labels it as 7 books in 1. The seven topics it covers are: digital photography overview, building your digital photography studio, taking great pictures, basics of image editing, editing with Photoshop/Photoshop Elements, restoring old photos and printing and sharing digital images. Like other for dummies books, its writing style is quite wordy, humorous, non-technical and very repetitive. Unfortunately this book actually seems like seven separate books written by several different authors. While some parts are detailed and well written, other parts are unclear due to their vagueness, other parts yet are simply incorrect or outdated.

This book is very difficult to describe as a whole because its parts vary in quality and accuracy. What unifies this book is its writing style. Indeed, most explanations are simple and are supported by several examples.

Part 1 of this book serves as an overview to digital photography. In many more words than necessary, it covers digital cameras, imaging software,  photo fixing and image storage. This very basic part diverges frequently with many irrelevant anecdotes. Furthermore, this part is quite vague and does not provide much information not found in the rest of the book.

Digital photography equipment is explained in part 2 of the book. Digital cameras are introduced based on features and pricing here. This part also explains the basic modes of digital cameras (program mode, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual mode) and common controls (ISO, metering and exposure compensation). While this part starts off well, the second half of it is full of errors and outdated information. In particular, one page mentions that EXIF is an image format, another has the relative pricing of flash memory and microdrives wrong, at least one reason for choosing a DSLR is false, the discussion of PC vs. Mac is inaccurate, the chapter on computer hardware is full of mistakes and the discussion on monitor dot-pitch is so oversimplified it is useless. While technological advancements constantly improve hardware, a lot of information in this chapter has never been true. On the other hand, printers, scanners and photographic accessories are well explained. Surprisingly the section on scanners is among the best in the entire book.

Taking Great Pictures, part 3 of  Digital Photography - All-in-one desk reference -For dummies should have been its own book. After an unimpressive start, this part unexpectedly stood out. Its first chapter, explains photographic composition in details with many comparative examples and interesting observations. Composition is inherently a difficult subject to tackle due to its creative nature, but the Taking Great Pictures does it admirably well. The remainder of part 3,  specifically covers different types of subjects such as close-ups, people, sports, action and travel photography. For each type of subject, equipment, composition and technique is discussed separately. Humor is used to keep readers interested while intricate details are explained to educate advanced hobbyists. Advanced topics include lighting, shooting for publications, publishing resources, product photography, painting with light, panoramas and adventure photography. Only two things about this part don't impress: the amount of repetition and the photographic examples. Perhaps, the latter is done purposefully not to intimidate beginning photographers.

Part 4 covers basic image editing. This is another good part of the book which covers its topic well. This part starts off by separating the possible from the impossible using image editing. Common image problems are then explained with examples and brief solutions. Having read other books on the topic, it was easy to appreciate that most explanations in this chapter do not depend on a specific imaging software. The final chapter of this part introduces various imaging software and how to chose between them. This is also something seldom seen since most books just focus on a single software from Adobe.

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements specifically are covered in part 5. This part is relatively short but serves well as an introduction to these two applications. The differences between these applications can be found scattered through the three chapters. Strangely, the book starts by explaining what is new to these software since the previous versions. It is unclear wether the target audience for this book would find that information useful.

Part 6 covers the topic of restoring old photos in details.  While it is roughly as short as the previous part, it covers the topic reasonably well and even has room to repeat some stuff (dodging and burning for example) from the previous two parts. Finally, part 7 covers printing and sharing images. This particular part is the shortest of all and contains surprisingly little information even for its length.

Overall, this book is less than half-full (or more than half-empty) with pertinent and accurate information. It feels like its been written by someone who knows photography, someone who knows imaging software and someone who knows scanners. Those topics are indeed well covered, but they could still have been covered more concisely. Anyone who has this book already should concentrate on its better parts. Others can find better value elsewhere.