Interesting topics but disorganized
I would recommend O'Keefe's "The Complete Reference, Framemaker 7" instead in almost all areas.
This book suffers from disorganization common in multi authored books. Its sections on structured FM offer little more than is in the pdf documents that come with FM. I was hoping for clever tricks using structured FM, but didn't find any in Ms. Ethier's book.
One area where many other books on FM are weak is in numbering. There are, however, excellent sources on the internet for FM numbering that make up for this deficiency. In Ms. Ethier's book, although a whole chapter is devoted to numbering, most of the numbering examples are fairly basic "how to set up an outlined numbering system".
Ms. Ethier's book does have a few good sections, such as running H/F variables and thumb tabs. In many areas, it introduces interesting concepts, such as database publishing, but is too incomplete to be more than just an introduction.
Although the layout of the book is well done (nice fonts, pretty pages, etc.), it often sounds more like what one might get stopping some FM expert in the hall and asking them about a concept. The expertise is there, but the organization is sloppy. For instance, on page 20, it says "if I run a conversion table on a brief document that uses only two paragraph formats and a character format, I get a sinple converstion table like you see in figure 2-1". However, figure 2-1 shows four paragraph formats and no character format.
