Lynda dressed as Lady Gaga for the 2011 lynda.com Halloween celebration. See more lynda.com staff in costume on the blog.

Welcome to our November 2011 newsletter! This month, we have a trio of photography courses that will help you create a one-of-a-kind gift for those on your holiday list: a personally crafted, created, and curated photo book. We also focus on using Excel for analyzing and organizing data, and introduce courses on web form best practices, building custom apps, and much more.

As the holidays approach, here’s an idea for a one-of-a-kind gift: a book containing photos of family and friends. The Blurb publishing service makes it possible, and it’s the subject of our new course, Creating Photo Books with Blurb, with Jan Kabili. This course presents three separate workflows for creating and publishing books that showcase photographs using the Blurb self-publishing service.

If you’d like to include old family photos in those books, we have two more new courses to help. Start by getting those treasures into digital form with Scanning Techniques for Photography, Art, and Design, with Taz Tally. The course is a review of scanning techniques for graphics professionals and photographers, delving into workflow considerations and the advanced image-quality controls available in most scanning software.

Make images look better than ever with Photo Restoration with Photoshop, with professional photo restorer Janine Smith. Janine describes how to evaluate scanned images for imperfections and addresses common problems and their fixes, starting with the basics (fading, spots, and paper texture) and continuing with more complex challenges (rips, adhesive tape, ink marks, and mold).

Whether your Blurb book contains new photos or old ones, you can save 20% on your Blurb order by using the code LYNDA22 on checkout. The code expires on November 30, 2011,* so start working on those personal gifts now!

*Offer expires November 30, 2011, at 11:59 PM PST. Enter promo code LYNDA22 at checkout. A 20% discount will be applied toward your order at checkout (maximum discount is USD $200.00, GBP £100.00, EUR €160,00, CAD $210.00, or AUD $180.00 off product totals). This offer is good for one-time use. It cannot be combined with other promotional codes, volume discounts, or gift cards, or be used for adjustments on previous orders.

We’ve all had the experience of encountering a form that was so unintuitive or time consuming to fill out that we gave up, figuring we could find the knowledge or product we were looking for elsewhere. We’re excited to welcome acclaimed digital product designer Luke Wroblewski (aka LukeW), who joins the lynda.com author team this month with a course designed to show you how to save your customers and your community from this frustration.

In Web Form Design Best Practices, Luke shows how to create web forms that encourage visitors to enter information and covers ways to capture input without the use of forms. The course also covers boosting conversion rates and customer satisfaction, organizing the structure of forms, aligning and grouping form elements, assigning the correct input field types, validating input, and handling data entry errors.

We’ve released two new courses for developers that take very different approaches to creating mobile applications.

For web developers who want to build native apps, Joseph Lowery’s Building Android and iOS Apps with Dreamweaver CS5.5 shows how to combine HTML, CSS, and other web technologies with PhoneGap, a free software package that was recently acquired by Adobe and is fully integrated with Dreamweaver CS5.5. The resulting applications feel like the web, but behave like real apps, and can be distributed through both the iOS App Store and the Android Market.

For developers who’ve learned a bit of Objective-C, Todd Perkins’ new course, Building and Monetizing Game Apps for iOS, describes how to build native game apps for the iPhone and iPad. You’ll see how Todd built Mole It !, an app you can download for free from the iOS App Store. The also course details how to build the app, and how to integrate advertising to generate revenue from applications you give away.

Two new courses by lynda.com veteran Dennis Taylor released this month show how to take full advantage of the database capabilities of Excel.

Setting Up a Database in Excel shows what you can and can’t do in Excel and how to get your Excel database set up right. The course begins by explaining the limits of Excel as a data management tool, and spells out the design considerations for creating an effective database. It shows how the table feature can be used to simplify database creation, as well as how to use form and data validation tools to control the data that goes into your database.

Managing and Analyzing Data in Excel shows how to maximize the data analysis capabilities of Excel by covering the powerful and easy-to-use database commands and methods critical to anyone who maintains an Excel database. Dennis explains and demonstrates sorting, adding subtotals, auto-filtering, when to use the Excel Advanced Filter, as well as how to use specialized database functions.

Until next month, happy learning!

—Lynda