AutoCAD Books

I am a novice, self-taught autocad user. This book bridged the gap between me, a mechanical engineer, and my autocad drafters. After completing each chapter, including the exercises, I am now a fully capable and independent drafter. The mechanical engineer version is perfectly tailored to everyday designs for the M.E. I highly recommend this book for those new to autocad and for those who want to greatly improve their autocad efficiency.

The book does a good job showing you how to use AutoCad 2000 in a mechanical environment. However the book did not deal with the menu and commands found in AutoCad Mechanical 2000 that I will be using to do mechanical drafting.

As a student in college we get autocad as a course.
I dediced to buy this book in order to go further and deeper into the subject.
This book is huge in size! George Omura offers guidance step by step, explaining most details; (i was pleased with the guidance, had little difficulties understanding even the more advanced topics)

This book is ideal for those wishing to get acquainted to autocad to a fairly advanced level. It offers a very thorough overall knowledge of autocad, suitable to the novice who just started out, climbing up the ladder. The books is composed in a similar way, explaining the basics in the beginning and gradually covering the more advanced topics. Important to mention, is the well organised appearance of the book, containing indexed words, allowing the reader to quickly look up topics by key-words!

For those wishing to go all the way, they probably will need to buy an extra book for advanced items such as advanced customisation and 3D but i am sure Omura can teach even some of the experts out there, as he clearly knows his thing.

It might be fair to say that i was a bit dissapointed to find not more covered about the 3D aspects of Autocad, but i realised later that Omura wrote a seperate book dedicated to explaining autocad's 3D abibilites in detail, which is understandable, knowing that this book alone is over 1000 pages!

I give this book 5 stars, finding the previous 3 stars given, a wrong representation of an excellent book.

The book doesn't go deep into customizing AutoCAD, but gives a complete brief overview for general purpose AutoCAD usage.

A must-have for long-time AutoCAD users who want to quickly implement AutoCAD 2000- and 2000i-based products. The beauty of this book is its focus on effectively using AutoCAD to solve business problems. A great supplement to the out-of-box documentation from Autodesk.

I have bought the special edition using autocad2000 to help me with a course I am taking at college. I had my teacher take a gander and he said that it was a good book but thought that it could elaborate a little more. The idea of spending some time explaining about drafting was a very nice touch though. philiperochon@aol.com

I recommend this book to my AutoCAD students, because it contains the "how to" on each command, not just the "what it does". Each chapter focuses on several similar commands, and provides clear instructions with plenty of examples and problems.

Although I recommend the book to my students, I alter the sequence of the chapters to fit the format and focus of an introductory course. This book provides a great reference for anyone using AutoCAD.

Within a week I was making my first 3d architectural model with good results. This book is very good and avoids to be general: it is focused on architecture and that is a relief after seeing a lot of books which explain autocad features with examples from all disciplines (mechanics, etc), which tend to confuse time-needing architects and draftmen. I recommended it in full.

The tutorial about shadow rendering is good but I had some trouble getting the right result (Acad R14). There is a bug in Autocad render module when MS Windows is set to international settings, I lost a couple of days finding out the solution to this problem. I found it at the technical support page of Autodesk. In the book there is no mention to it.

This book has a very limited scope on most issues but in some of the cases it had tricks and secrets i couldnt get from the "Maximizing AutoLISP" by NRP. It also deals with DCL programming which is something MAL does not. It has very good examples for DCL Also tries to deal with ADS - but very briefly thus it fails . A complimentary book for the Maximizing AL book

Well worth the purchase , though.

I am an instructor at a vocational-technical college where I teach CADD Technology offering an A.A.S. degree. The student understanding of AutoCAD is apparent by the work that they produce. I attribute this to my use of this book as one of the references for my curriculum. I am eager to see the latest book by Mr. Leach as I am now teaching AutoCAD 14.

AutoCad Instant Reference book is small but a complete book with a quick and easy listing of the New Features with Release 14. The comand descriptions are short and to the point. However before purchasing this book, I would strongly suggest that you have a good understanding of AutoCad 12, and 13.

I am the head engineer at the company I work for (actually, I am the only engineer, so that makes it easy to be the "head engineer", but I digress). I have taught AutoCAD for several years in a continuing education department at a local college. I now teach the same course in a local high school's adult education program (the college courses were 6x the cost for the same course!). Anyway, this is probably the best AutoCAD book I have ever seen. It explains nearly everything in detail and offers examples on items other books do not. For example, using the "parallel" object snap is mystifing to most people, and most books do not show how to use it. They might tell you how to use it, but they do not show you. This book does. This book just offers more information
This is an excellent reference book also for those who are not beginners. However, sometimes the book presents too much information at once and overwhelms the person new to AutoCAD.
I do not actually use this book in my classes, however, because it is just too expensive. Of course, it is produced as a textbook and like all textbooks it is overpriced because students are typically stuck with whatever textbook they have to use and must pay the price. Textbook prices are a scam in general, and this is no exception. $95 is a ridiculous price for a book. Anyway, I produce all the materials for my AutoCAD program myself, and recommend the students just buy any book they like to use as a reference.
So if your company is buying you a book, I would buy this one. The only fault is the price. Also, it is handy for a book to have a disk with it so you can have ready-made problem examples (very handy for the beginner). This one does not. Maybe the newer versions do, but the 2002 I have did not. I was recently looking to get a AutoCAD 2007 book since the new classes I am going to teach have updated to AutoCAD 2007.
I wanted the AutoCAD Instructor by Leach, but even I will not pay that price. I bought a lesser book for under $30.00.
In conclusion, this is the best book on AutoCAD I have ever used for the beginner, and a great book of reference for anyone. It just costs too much. Therefore, the 5 star rating is only a 4 because of cost.

I am mostly happy with this book, but it is primarily a college course workbook, not a a technical reference. It did teach me a few things that I had not figured out for myself, so it was good in that respect. I expected more for the price, however...