AutoCAD Books

I took an Autocad class and learned the basics of the program. This book helped my knowledge to grow beyoond the basics and helped me to use the 3d portion of the program. It is a great resource!

I have worked with previous AutoCad versions along with Desktop 3.3 and this book made the transition from those programs to Desktop 2005 a lot easier. 2005 has so many shortcuts and components and this book gives step-by-step examples that really speed up the process. I recommend this book to anyone who is advancing to the new Desktop 2005 software.

If you're an architect that already knows AutoCAD well, this is a good book to transition into ADT. It covers the basic structure of ADT and setting up projects in step by step tutorials for both residential and commercial projects.

I also like the fact that this book is more about principals and concepts than commands and has a lot of tips for CAD managers. However, the tutorials are great for learning ADT and it's perfect for both users and CAD/Project managers.

Aubin knows his stuff!

Paul's new book has something for everyone.

It is a great resource for the new user with broad ranging self-paced tutorials.

Experienced ADT users will appreciate the "New in ADT 2005" icons to quickly pick up new features and improvements such as those found in the Callouts, Keynotes, and Details.

CAD Manager notes offer practical advice for those resposible for establishing their company's standards.

Good job Paul!

This book only scratches the surface of mastering ADT 2005. However, it was a great book for getting over the beginning humps of ADT.

-George Omura's books are always the best of the group. I always recommend them to my clients and colleagues. His books are always easy to follow, if a bit too heavy for reading in bed. His added content CD's are a great bonus too. The whole idea is that you should step your way through the examples. Or even better yet, use them as examples to do a real project that you're working on (and getting paid for!). I always snag a copy of Omura's books as soon as they come out wheather I have that new version of ACAD yet or not, I know I'll need it eventually.

I am a Registered Architect and have been using AutoCAD since the first version, with a few skips and sidetracks along the way into other CAD programs. I primarily do "small" buildings, custom homes, and quite a bit of consulting, including some tutoring for Architect's that can't or won't take the time out of their busy schedules to actually take a class in AutoCAD. George Omura's books are always the best of the group. I always recommend them to my clients and colleagues.

I learned to use AutoCAD 14 confidently using this book and now use it at work daily. This book will give you an unshakable foundation on which you may become productive in AutoCAD> AutoCAD 14 is easier to come by and less of an expence compared to AutoCAD 2000. However, to make the step from 14 to 2000 is a peice of cake.

Get this book! I paid full price, check out the auctions though. And read all the reviews.

I used this book as a review, as I had not used AutoCAD since its DOS Release (R11) version in about 4 years. It helped me review basic drawing and dimensioning techniques.I found it easy to follow and I was able to pick up the 3-D modeling pretty easy which later helped me in learning AutoDesks Mechanical DeskTop. AutoCAD is not as roboust for Solid Modeling by the way, 3D wire drawings are pretty good though. I also liked the review of AutoLisp and the AutoCAD VBA techniques, I thought that this book to be very comprehensive.

I've had no training in Autocad. I do not use Autocad in my line of work. I got it because I wanted to learn something new just for the "Heck of it". I bought the software, and then I bought this book. I've created my own "cheat sheets" with command shortcuts, and I find myself referring back to the book constantly. With this book alone I have learned how to navigate R14 to the extent that I can do most anything on a non-professional level... I would have liked the book to have included more lessons, but that is what college classes are for. Overall, I'm quite satisfied. Lots of knowledge with no regrets.

This book covers the spectrum from the layman, to the experienced professional looking to deepen his understanding of the tools available in Autocad14. It is usefull both as a reference and a tutorial. Skipping through or page by page, there is no gap in the usefullness of this text.

I took AutoLISP at Austin Community College and was given instructural materials. Although good, they were not as in depth as I needed them to be. The instructor used this book as a reference and recommended it to me as I do to others. It is a wonderful book full of information far beyond what I learned in class and has the necessary group codes and functions as well as other invaluable information listed in the appendix.

I had been working with Autocad for awhile and I always wanted
get to the next level: Customization. All the material
I had researched was for intermediate to advanced levels.
I needed something to get me started and would reward me by
allowing me to get a simple function to work. If you are new
to programming this is the book. Once you take off and get a
better understanding you can always get more information from other sources.
Do your homework and this book will get you there.

I taught myself AutoLISP from this book. I was not a seasoned programmer when I started, only a seasoned ACAD user. I had always wanted to learn AutoLISP, but the AutoLISP tutorial within ACAD--the garden path with tiles--made me feel stupid because I couldn't learn from it. This book was what I was looking for. It starts simple, so I gained confidence as I went. It moves at the right pace, and it covers not so easy concepts, like LAMBDA and MAPCAR. By the end I felt very confident with AutoLISP. Today, it is literally within arm's reach as I write this review. I highly recommend it as a way to learn AutoLISP.

I am AutoCAD Programming instructor at a technical college and have used this book for several semesters.
The book is a good reference reference with a good DCL section however I feel it is lacking in "real world" applications.
Also it needs to be updates to include visual lisp functions.

While I found this book very helpful in introducing me to AutoLISP and the exercises are educational & informative, I have two major problems with this book. First, the solutions to the exercises don't exists; there are several exercises I was unable to do successfully after various attempts and there was no solution to help me understand what I was doing wrong. Second, there is no way to contact the authors when the above mentioned situation arises. If they write further additions I hope they will address these issues. I would not recommend this book to a beginner, but it might be helpful to intermediate or advanced users.

I specifically targeted this book because of the disintegrate material effect but was unable to follow it cos of missing parts in the tutorials/scenes. upon trying to work it out my self , I still havent I will have to put this book in the toilet as emergency toilet paper. I was really dissappointed when I sent emails to coriolis to try and get the proper tut file scenes (2 years ago) and still havent recieved any feedback, this is so frustrating. I'll never buy another coriolis text again.

This book isn't much more than a picutre book, showing what 3D Studio MAX R3 is capable of. The tutorials are poorly put together, and some of them are missing steps which for some users might not be able to complete them. Not a book I recommend buying.

Wow, I don't know if they have awards for these kinds of books, but Jon Bell should be able to run away with this one.

He covers a lot of great stuff in this book including all the new things that R3 has. Including Flex, the new material options, plus it has some sweet models you can try. Like the SR-71 Blackbird, and an alien.

The CD that comes with is also the best to come around in a long time. It includes a bonus material library, hordes of free plugins including Greeble!, lots of free maps and chapter files. The Cd itself is worth the 40-50 bucks.

This one is worth the money!

If you want to get more out of 3D Studio MAX, then this book's for you. The chapters on advanced materials and lighting helped me create better-looking scenes immediately, and the special-effects stuff (including the great Greeble plugin) is well worth the price of the book. Highly recommended!

If there were ever 2 things I couldn't do well they were making good Materials and Organic Modelling...until I bought this book. Unlike other books that tell you how to recreate their effects, this book tells you what the steps presented do, allowing you to recreate and tweak them as you need. Excellent book!

The material does not correspond with ADT 2006. As you read and start lessons, the book calls for you to push buttons that don't exist and to use commands that don't appear in the menus they say they should. It is definitely not for someone to learn from, only to refresh what one already knows.

Very good book for the price. Definitely the buy for someone who has some autocad background. However, I did find the book to be somewhat to broad in its examples. I think the author would have done much better if he had limited his scope of example to either residential or commercial. The residential examples were not very specific and were only understood if one read the commercial examples first. Being that I only design residential, it is a great resource in describing the different tools and commands available in the program.

My firm recently upgraded from 2002 to 2006 and it's been an ordeal. We've decided to use the project navigator's full functionallity and this book has been a wonderfull reference for the methodology behind it. I'd recommend this book to anyone doing the same.

As usual, Paul's latest Mastering ADT book is a must-have for anyone needing to learn how to use ADT in a real-world scenario. Rather than just another useless listing of commands and features, it is a process-oriented series of tutorials that walk users through example projects with plenty of coverage of the "why" as well as the "how to". As an ADT instructor and consultant, I recommend it to all of my students and customers.

MADT 06 is over-the-top helpful. With consistent reading and follow through of exercises, we easily moved from, "What the heck is all this stuff? -- to, "I get it, I get it, I can't live without it." We found Mr. Aubin's tools and project examples very applicable and useful to real world application. Another great advantage of reading MADT is the author's explanation of out of the box material in the software. Most draftsmen are compelled to spend weeks re-configuring the software and tools to draw like they draw. Aubin helps explain this is not necessary. He's right. The author not only clearly explains how to use this complicated software but helps us understand that it is already equipped to save us time and money without spending endless man-hours making it draw with every color, line weight, block and tool that we've used the last 20 years.

This book is absolute garbage!
The whole book is a tutorial with a lot of example problems for the user to solve. That's great!! The problem is when they LEAVE OUT very important measurements for you to complete the examples. So I've spent hours and hours working on one and now I can't finish it because they've FAILED to inlcude some very key data. Good job Thomson Learning!! You've successfully pushed yet another incomplete book out the door without so much as a decent proof read. Unbelieveable!!

I decided to purchase this book largely based on the positive reviews that I saw on Amazon. The ugly and generic cover kind of turned me off but everybody said it was great so I went ahead bought it.

Boy was I disappointed.

The fact that they obviously just slapped on "Inventor 10" to their Inventor 9(or lower) book stands out a lot. Many of the tool bars have changed/rearranged so it takes some looking around to go through the tutorials. Yes it may only cost me a few minutes for each time I have to do this, but if I'm shelling out ~$100 for a book it would have been nicer to know they put more of an effort in updating it other than finding and replacing "Inventor 9" with "Inventor 10".

They don't even go over Inventor Studio, which is a very large addition and selling point of Inventor 10+!

Other then those obvious translation issues it is a very solid book, and if I was using this for the correct version it was originally written for I would have been very very happy.

In the end this may have been a great book for whatever original version it was written for, but just slapping on "Inventor 10" and sticking a $100 price tag on the book isn't my idea of a great book.

Do yourself a favor, buy a book catered toward this specific version or newer. Or just buy the Inventor 9 book @ 50% of what this costs, it's the same stuff! ><

I plan to use "Autodesk Inventor" as an instructional textbook in my Advanced CAD Class during the 2001-2002 school year. I have been exploring the material in this text during my free time (during this summer of 2001). I feel that the upper level high school students using this text will not only be able to construct the 3-D models detailed in this book but will enjoy learning the use of the Autodesk Inventor software.

I wish to thank Mr. Ron K. C. Cheng for writing this book. My hat is off to you. Although the "Food Grinder" took a good deal of time and patience on my part (to work through), it was a great exercise.

I highly recommend this book for any educator who wishes to instruct 3-D modeling with the use of AutoDesk Inventor.

The specific question on ZIP can be found in Chapter 1 of the online companion. It is the Pack and Go Wizard that zips the entire directory into a compressed file. Besides, the R4 new features and tutorials on the new features are also found in the online companion, which has six chapters corresponding to the chapters in the book.

As a student in industrial design I found that this book do has a good balance on both concepts and tutorials, especially on all those parametric solid modeling, assembly modeling, and sheet metal modeling. The free-of-charge online companion is the best I ever found. It's free and it's user friendly. The Pack and Go, epicyclic mechanism and adaptive assembly tutorials are especially interesting and useful. They help me solve a lot of real world problems when I am doing my part time job. I recommend to save your money and use this book for both R3 and R4.

I have reviewed this book in its entirety. I found it to be pretty simplistic, and i would not consider it a book from which to learn much about programming in VBA. I found about a dozen errors in this book which i contacted the author about in emails, with no response. Having used autocad for 16 years, I would like to see more in depth coverage. overall, i found the book average, with some sloppy mistakes

I've spent over $200 in VB books which didn't come close to what your book did for me.

I bought your book "AutoCAD Visual Basics - VBA" and I am love it. This is one of the few books that is written the way I would. It is so easy to understand that I am moving very fast with it.

This book was not intended for the average cad user in my opinion. It seem like it was design to help the experience AutoCAD users who has had some hours in either Lisp and/or any other programming language. It helped me get started on the basic things like creating entities and modifying them. You will NOT learn VBA for AutoCAD in a book that's under 200 pages long, but this one will sure get you started in the right direction. Thanks Jerry.

This book, though a valiant effort, is not what a potential AutoCAD VBA programmer needs. Jerry uses non-standard coding styles and most of the examples in the book do not work. It's simpilitic coverage is not what a newcomer to VBA programming needs, but rather real short examples of code that works. A potential buyer of this book would be well advised to look instead at "AutoCAD 2000 VBA Programmers Reference" from Wrox Press, Ltd.

This book gives you the push you need to start working on AutoCAD. I started great work on it in less than 48 hours. This book illustrates main ideas in a very concise way so that you can build upon your knowledge. According to its title it gives you the first blocks to build upon starting your AutoCAD career.

AutoCAD was very confusing for me, even buying a book didnt help any. I got help from administrator and we both ended up in a rut. i dont recomend this

This book gives you the push you need to start working on AutoCAD. I started great work on it in less than 48 hours. This book illustrates main ideas in a very concise way so that you can build upon your knowledge. According to its title it gives you the first blocks to build upon starting your AutoCAD career.

This was my third try at self tutoring in AutoCAD. The material is without error. Everything is clearly explained. Lessons are short and to the point. 45 mins. a day had me up and drawing in less than 2 weeks. If a solid foundation is required for success, then I'm off to a great start on my AutoCad career.

This book has an error in every chapter I worked through it but I would not recommend it to any one and it has few lessons to build your skill.

This book is more geared towards mechanical drafting rather than architectural drafting. But nonetheless it's a good book for referential purposes.

This is a great book and has come in handy now that I know AutoCAD but it was a little too difficult for me to start with. My teacher showed me a much easier book "Exercise Workbook for Beginning AutoCAD 2002" by Shrock Publishing. You can review it on their website. It made learning AutoCAD very simple. Also, why are these books so expensive. ...

This is an excellent book. It's a well-written exposition of many (perhaps all) features of AutoCAD 2002.

If you already use AutoCAD and are looking for a reference in which to look up advanced features as the need arises, this book would be an excellent choice.

If you're new to AutoCAD and are learning from scratch, this book might be an excellent choice. It contains about 300 clearly described sequential excercies which walk you through many (perhaps all) features of AutoCAD 2002. After you finish, you'll be a proficient user. But expect to invest a substantial amount of time (perhaps 3 weeks full-time).

If you're learning from scratch and just want to invest a couple of days to learn the basic features and then jump in, you might want to look for a shorter book. The first 5 chapters purports to do this, but it doesn't do it well in my judgment.

This books is better than the autodesk manual for showing you how to draw with AutoCAD and some of the drawing features. If you are looking for a book that explores how to customize AutoCAD using LISP, VBA or ObjectARX look elsewhere.

I mostly use this book as a reference. Every time I have searched for a particular command or topic I have found it; and clearly explained. I highly recommend it either as a reference book or as a step by step guide to thoroughly learn AutoCad 2002.

My previous use of AutoCAD was 14. I am an old timer at dabbling with AutoCAD form version 3 on. However I was stunned to find the progress made with 2006 and would not want to attempt without reading and trying the examples in this book first.

Yes all this information can be found else ware. However this book has it organized and portable. The best books are those that tell you what you already know the next best like this one force you to try the different functions. You do not need to remember them all but if you are not exposed than you won't know to look for them when you can use them.

I am not sure that this is the best learn from scratch book dispensable as engendering, architecture, etc. However would not like to tackle AutoCAD 2006 without it.

A problem solving approach is a good concept in its self as this is how many of us learn. And the book helps us break out of the original drawing board mentality. The whole idea of computer design and drawing is speed and accuracy; using this book helps to find the best approach to that speed and accuracy.

Look for such things as:
Dynamic Blocks
Dynamic input
New Tools
Palettes

This one book is a perfect resource to learn a software like AutoCAD. Everytime we start AutoCAD, we can find something new, and this one book has the explaination of everything we find new. The examples are just perfect to teach the concept given in the theory. The 2D part is very well planned and so is the 3D part. Some chapters are available for free download also, which I am yet to check. This book is highly recommended for everyone.

This one book is good enough to teach you full autocad. Explaination is easy to understand and examples help to learn the program well. Rendering is very well explained with amazing examples. I was really glad to see those examples after rendering them on my screen. Overall a wonderful book.

Doing architecture, I now carry 6 books and my laptop, and this is not one of them. most of the info in this book is in the ACAD help system. The examples drive you to use them, but the examples are not nearly as complete as the tutorials in other books, and are not kick started by the tutorial CD found with other books.
Sooo... I end up carrying in my backpack Aubin, Goldberg and Wyatt on Architectural desktop and the ACAD reference. It is bad enough trying to wade through the application books for answers, without having to deal with this book. The computer search in ACAD is great, however requires lots of sifting where this book takes you right to the place the info is, but it is still not worth toting.

This is a big book, approximately 1,340 pages. We adopted the book for three freshman drafting classes. The 2005 book was adopted last year. This is the first year that I taught using a book written by Sham Tickoo. It was a mistake. The size of the book has discouraged most students from using it. Once the students get past the size, they noticed that most of the information in the book, both; 2005 and 2006 was out of the AutoCAD help files. I wonder how the book can be published with this similar information?

The book is very wordy and it seems that the author wants to fill pages with AutoCAD help documents. Use the AutoCAD help documents and buy a different book.