graphics and multimedia

The documentation that comes with the Maya SDK is a great reference for individual parts of the API, but comes up short on covering the big picture of how and why everything fits together. This book fills that hole perfectly. Even though I've successfully written several Maya plugins by banging around with the examples and the API reference, in just a few hours with this book I gained a much deeper level of understanding about how Maya's internal framework is really constructed.

If you're a professional programmer who's even thinking about working with Maya, buy and read this book before writing a single line of code. It will pay for itself in time saved.

I learned more from the first chapter of this book than from all of 'Maya Fundamentals' or 'Maya Character Animation'. If your a begginer planning on getting serious with Maya I'd recommend going through the 10 or so tutorials that come with Maya and THEN pick this book up (don't waste money on begginer's books). It elegantly expounds the real fundamentals of Maya - the fundamentals that you must know in order to really uderstand the program. Don't expect to be dazzled with the examples. This book will provide essential understanding of the most important principles of Maya - not tell you how to model or animate. After reading this small book you should be able to pick up any book that assumes technical knowledge and focuses on artistic methods of modeling, animation, texturing etc. to learn how to be a true Maya artist.

This is book is far more better than I expected, just like the previous guy said I can't put it down, its got stuff that explained extremely well, and damn fun to read.
If you are an artist this book is easy to understand.
If you are a C/java programmer this book is very easy to understand
if you are some sort of computer science or related student, this is damn easy and very fun to read.

I have loads of text books some I read few pages and now is in the dust, but this one is one of a kind that you can't get anywhere else.