CAD and CAM Books

This book "Microsoft Office Visio Step by Step" is yet another example of an almost useless manual, that barely duplicates what is available in the online manual for Visio.

It basically consits of screen shots and procedures.

It doesn't sit back and say "well, what might a user want to do here? Oh, you want to create a circle with center and radius? Then look for such and such a shape in such and such a stencil." Etc.

Because it lacks this "meta-contemplation", this manual is only as good as the programmers - it is basically like talking to the programmers, in their mindset. (I'm a programmer: this is NOT good). If what you need to draw is exactly covered by Visio, this manual may help you. If what you need to draw is not exactly covered by one of Visio's pre-packaged setups, this manual is not much help.

I work in an intensely graphical field - VLSI design. But Visio has no pre-packaged setup for my area --- the "electrical engineering" and "digital design" stencils and templates are not very useful. (This opinion confirmed by surveying my fellow engineers at Intel and AMD - all of us want to use Visio, but all find Visio sorely lacking.)

This manual is utterly useless with respect to advanced Visio, e.g. using ShapeSheets to create "smart" shapes.

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Because I have mentioned my employers' names, past and present, I must add this disclaimer: this review is my own personal opinion, not the official position of Intel and AMD.

Although I daresay many engineers at Intel and AMD agree with these sentiments, it may be hard to put this on the record.

Well organized and easy to study. Suits multiple learning styles. The CD has some excellent additional information.

This is a well-written and easily understood intro to Visio, which does a good job of covering diagrams, flowcharts, Gantt charts, floorplans, and the like. But, it has absolutely no information on building database diagrams with Visio, for which I deducted a star.

I really enjoyed going through this book. It is laid out well and has lessons you can do to help you learn.

Don't spend your money on this book, there is a lot of repetive stuff in it. Also, if you already work in the field of ASIC design, you will not learn much in this book, trust me.

I really liked this book and found its rules and guidelines very useful. Many of the guidelines are common sense, but it is still very appropriate to have them codified in a single textbook. Practitioners of full-custom approaches to IC design will complain that this is an "ASIC" book. It does have some rules that folks from that background will find hard to swallow (eg, no latches, no gated clocks). But 70% of the book is still applicable to full custom design and will result in faster re-use of full custom cores. The book gets off to a fairly wooly start but becomes substantial with the RTL Coding Guidelines chapter. From then on, its really solid stuff. This is a good book for the times. With much discussion of design re-use and transferable intelectual property in the chip industry, it has all the hallmarks of becoming a 'bible' book for IC designers of all stripes.

This book pointed out many design problems that I just met before. Designer could avoid many of them by following the guidelines in this book. I think it would help me a lot in my design work. Thanks to the authors.

The guidelines are not difficult to understand, and you may have the pieces here and there. But this book has a broad coverage. I got this book by luck draw at SNUG. Didn't pay attention at first until I read it. Very well organized, very accurate description of the real feelings of doing a real chip. The methodology it talks about is not limited to "reuse". I suggest the auther change the title for next edition.

I used this book as a secondary book, to review my knowledge 2 days before the exam, I pass the test with the help from newhorizon, ALL-IN-ONE and this book.

In my opinion, this book is written very well with easy to understand writing style as well, the explanations are very concise and clear.

I will give 5 stars if this book has better practice exams, the questions presented by this book are not enough and mostly just require you to memorize the material in order to answer that correctly instead of fully understanding that.

Another thing that bothered me was a question on how to remove broadcast storm, the answer from this book is by creating vlan, I think that the one that remove broadcast storm is STP (correct me if i am wrong) and moreover the author didn't mention anything about broadcast storm in his discussion about switch.

The other things are just good, I would recommend everyone to use this book combined WITH OTHER BOOK as well.

I beg to differ with the review posted on 11/13/2004 from a D. Duffy. I am the author of the Security+ Fast Pass book. I have reviewed the content and double checked my original sources, the sources listed by D. Duffy, and a few additional sources. The information about asymmetric cryptography and public key cryptography in the Security+ Fast Pass book is correct and in-line with all widely recognized and authoritative texts on the subject.

If by "wrong" D. Duffy means that I did not fully explain the entire concept nor went into mathematical detail about the algorithms involved or the software code used for implementation - then I didn't. This book is about learning the facts and details related to the Security+ exam. While some background and supporting documentation is needed in general and is provided in this text, the book's design purposely focuses only on the material essential for the exam.

I would like D. Duffy to respond to me directly the contact or support links at www.sybex.com. Please indicate exactly what you find incorrect and where you have found contradictory data. Please provide page numbers and ISBNs.

Thank you.
-James Michael Stewart

This is an easy book to read to get a baseline 60% of what you need to pass Security+. I passed the 100 question Security+ test today. I recommend this cost effective book to start. My most valuable assets were measureup.com and filling in the holes of my knowledge with up date material and research. I dont think there is a two book set to help you pass this test. Spend your money on transcenders and measureup and fill in from there.

I passed the test with a 836. This is midway between the passing cutoff (764) and the maximum score (900).

I used FastPass as a quick review before taking the test. If you are new to InfoSec, as I was, read a full study guide first.
The one I used was "Security+ Study Guide, 2nd Edition" published by Sybex 2004, ISBN 0-7821-4350-4. This book is on CompTIA's Authorized Quality Curriculum list for this test and it deserves to be.

If you are a seasoned InfoSec pro FastPass may be all you need to pass the test. One caution: FastPass gets asymmetric cryptology and public/private keys wrong (the Study Guide gets it right; also goto rsalabs.com and click Crypto FAQ).

Read my Amazon review on the "Security+ Study Guide, 2nd Edition" mentioned above.

D. Duffy, MBA, CNE, MCSE, ASE, CCNA, CCDA, A+

I am also very new to parametric design using SolidWork. This is my first year in teaching and working with the software. The tutorial helps and guides me through this book in a step-by-step process. Great examples and layout. I would HIGHLY recommend this book for all teachers. Your student will love it.

This is, easily, the single most useless how-to book I have ever encountered. It is merely a walk-through of a single, trivial example of one model construction. There are no in-depth analysis, no "why", and no mention of at least 75% of the features of the software...

I am very new to this parametric design in SolidWork. This tutorial helps and guide you through step by step to build a model.

I would recommend this book to any beginner at SolidWorks

I am reviewing this book after having completed working through all its excercises. It took me five days, working 4 to 5 hours a day. I am completely satisfied. This is the best tutorial that I have seen for ANY CAD program, let alone for solid modelling.

This was one of two assigned texts for a CAD Solids class that I took. The first text was more of a reference dictionary for the various commands and features- I didn't use it more than once or twice. On the other hand, this book is more of a programmed learning course and I read every page. In fact, I found myself refering back to this book for reference, since I now had hands-on experience now in actually applying the commands (as opposed to merely reading an obtuse, poorly written definition.) The authors of this book literally spell out every single mouse click and keyboard stroke step-by-step as you work through a fairly complex real life project.

As for the project, it is a fully solid modelled electric lantern. You build every single component in the assembly, both fabricated and purchased. Then, you unite them into subassemblies and assemblies. Finally, you are shown how to generate working shop drawings (details and assembly) from your models.

I have used 3-D and solid modelling programs from competitors. This book, and Solid Works itself, is far superior to anything else out there. This is the practical parametric and solids modelling program that the industry has been promising for the last 12 years or so.

Moreover, if you have this book and access to the program, then you don't really need an instructor.

I highly recommend this book along with Matt's "SolidWorks 2007 Bible" for those wanting to get the most out of SolidWorks. I am very impressed with the content and layout of this book. Very easy to read and the color illustrations are perfect for understanding the material. Matt's writing is clear and concise. When I first heard that this book was being written, I eagerly awaited its release. Now that I have gone through the book, it has far exceeded my expectations. Well done.

This book is not as good as the author's "bible" in that this one does not have as many step by step tutorials. This one covers Solidworks 2008 and 2007 mostly. I was impressed with the author's bible book so I ordered this one too. If he added more tutorials instead of writing mostly theory and details of Surfacing it would be easier too learn. The print quality of the book with colored images is very good. It did not come with a cd of tutorial files and the book in pdf format. You are told to visit website for tutorial files. So I recommend the book but it is not for beginners.

I believe this to be the best SolidWorks book for advanced part modeling currently available on the market. This is a good and informative book aimed at the intermediate/expert SolidWorks user.

A good understanding of SolidWorks is required to get the most from this book.

The book covers all the advanced features available in SolidWorks in detail and where it can it tells you where you would use a particular feature.

The title is self explanatory. This book is primarily aimed at people that do consumer product design where appearance and smooth surfaces are required.

The only reason I gave this book 4 stars is because I believe there is always room to make things better. That said, this is my best SolidWorks book yet.

The book is absolutely not for the beginner or the intermediate user. It should say Experts ONLY! And even then? I've been using SolidWorks for approximately 15 months, and got very frustrated trying to understand the book.

It does have many items on surfacing, mostly theory, but does not provide many practical tutorials or detail instructions. It reminds me of a person jumping off a cliff who thinks they can fly. There is no CD in the book with models to back engineer, if you can not follow the text. The book does not cut the mustard and the writing style is poor. I think I need a VAR class?

The topics are discussed in a too generic way to let the reader take advantage of the book.

Comprehensive and serious, it is worth reading.
Some comments (for the first edition):
-Assertions and white-box checkers are not exactly the same.
(sometimes white-box checkers are more natural in say `e' than is PSL or SVA that are mostly temporal based)

- Ooops , In all SVA examples "disable iff (rst_n)" ... ;-)

- A small one, Page 204 example 6-46 :
" assert property (@posedge clk) disable iff (rst_n)
not ( SMQueNew -> $isunknown( ... ))) "

The `not' should have been after the `->' , the current semantics is wrong.


The book also lacks mentioning of assertions inside dynamic TB objects.
(`e' supports it, maybe other languages too).


Though, my key comment is that there is a lot more to verification than assertions ( e.g. Testbench implementation ).

Ran Keren

Once again, after "Principles of Verifiable RTL Design" written with L. Bening, Harry Foster wrote the book that made new level of standards in ASIC community. Even with notice that, as a Verplex Systems guy, he evidently advertise specific Formal Verification techniques, this book could not get anything then 5 big stars. Not only that this is the only book on the market that cover important topics like Assertions, this is also well and systematically written book, full of examples in OVL, PSL and SystemVerilog. And whatever ASIC designers say that they don't have time for Assertions, future is going in this direction. Book is written equally for design and verification engineers, but also for system architects and everybody involved in ASIC development. This book probably will not shake ASIC design world as previous bestseller from the same author, but it presents state of the art in covered area from the man who knows his job very well ...

This is a good book for quick reference to things that you may have forgotten how to do. Look somewhere else if you want a book for the complete beginner.

Since deciding to become a CAD goddess, I've found reviews for 2008 CAD books in short supply so here you go ...

CAD For Dummies is in all truth a book for beginners, more experienced users may be able to profit by the tidbits that refer to new features in this year's release and tricks but since I'm a beginner and I've found it all easy enough to understand, I don't expect it will be much more that a pleasure read for CAD veterans.

With this book you can expect to become familiar with AutoCAD 2008. You will get comfortable with it, you'll know what the buttons are for, what the tools do and what the program's overall capabilities are. In other words, you'll be proficient. Not a grasshopper anymore but not quite a master. It prepares you to tackle more specialized books in whatever field (architectural, electrical, mechanical, 3d, etc) you're interested in with a great set of honed skills and a reasonable amount of confidence. It's an excellent foundation on which to build.

A couple of other things I'd like to mention are the awesome icons that can be found throughout the book, they serve to point out crucial information that you shouldn't forget, useful techie stuff, tips to make your AutoCAD life easier and how to avoid horrible-pull-your-hair-out-in-desperation-mistakes. Lastly, there are really no exercises, I'm a hands on kind of chick, I wanted to be drawing right away. So my solution to this was to buy another book to supplement this deficency and I'm happy to say that AutoCAD 2008: No Experience Required is as well in the awesome side. I'll be reviewing it soon.

Now, CAD For Dummies is not a CAD Bible (thank goodness), it doesn't tell you everything and at times it refers you to AutoCAD's Help features (very convenient). In my experience "Bible" books are more in the nature of a very overwhelming, unreadable, unliftable reference tool. And they don't tell you what you need to know as a beginner, they are manuals to a program.

Much better than help in Autocad.It doesn't give you 1000 options then, lead you nowhere like help. Easy reading. Straight to the point.

This is the 3rd one I have read. I had Autocad 14 & 2000 also.

I liked the approach of describing the gate model, dataflow and behavioral model, all in one place, unlike other books. The text is mostly very clear. More state diagrams here and there may clarify. Unfortunatly PLI is not really covered. The CD rom contains only the code: other books provide a free (student version) vhdl simulator. At $ 135.00 + tax, the price is high, compared to other similar books covering the same topic.

A.G. - San Jose, CA

This book is really a worthwhile book to read and study for advanced topics of designs based on Verilog and Synopsys synthesis tools. The feature-rich topics and details of how the constructs of the designs are made are quite clear and well-written for people involved. The only thing I'm concerned is the price seems to be way way too high to general reader, as it's $135 before tax. Hopefully the price can drop at least 40% less so that everybody can buy it. regards, JKL, San Jose, Calif.

The book has plenty of code samples, however, many of them have mistakes, making it difficult and sometimes frustrating to study the code. The explanations are not well written when compared to other books (Thomas and Moorby's), however there is some information that cannot be found in other books. An excellent book except for the price and mistakes on nearly every page. If you are already experienced in Verilog, this may be an excellent reference, however, if you are just learning, Thomas Moorby's "The Verilog Hardware Description Language" is an excellent and highly recommended book.

It shouldn't be hard to find a better text than this one for an AutoCAD course or for self-study. Though this "Exercise Workbook" is supposedly for "Beginning AutoCAD 2007," the illustrations and portions of the instructions correspond to the 2006 edition of AutoCAD. This error is likely to be off-putting for the absolute AutoCAD neophytes to whom this workbook is addressed.

Furthermore--though the publisher does clearly state the fact--the included edition of AutoCAD 2007 - while it is the complete software (and not a "light" version) - nevertheless inconveniently "times out" in about a month... probably not enough time to work through the entire book at a sane and profitable pace.

While working with the ACTUAL software should be a plus in learning, its inclusion here may actually work against the learner.

Either the timeout on the included software were better extended to full-semester length (say 4-5 months) or an untimed, stripped down Learner's ELEMENTS of AutoCAD should have been produced to go with its matching workbook (which would not be THIS text).

The text and fonts are large enough for easy reading. Screens are reproduced clearly enough. Nevertheless, the whole production has a rather rough-and-ready, "cheesy feel" about it.

In other words, the "production values" are not high. Though this workbook is not expensive (and certainly not at Amazon!), its perhaps consequent crudeness relative to more produced or crafted (and more expensive?) texts, may defeat the virtue of being easily come by.

Easy come... not necessarily easy- (and definitely not long-) going. This workbook gives the impression that its author is merely riding the wave of successive editions of the software... merely retitling, perhaps adding new installation instructions - but not much more tracking than that - to keep consistent with changes in the software (which didn't even happen on this go-round!).

Apart from the software timeout issue, the pedagogy itself seems sound and confident with information presented in coherent small chunks. The author actually seems to let herself down with this somewhat tired 2006 redux of (one is led to expect without actually doing the examination) a 2005 redux of....

For anyone looking to learn the architecture program AutoCAD, this workbook is ideal. It instills a challenge yet manageable tenacity for every beginner. As a post-novice experience, Shrock's Workbook for Advanced AutoCAD is a meticulous step. 5 stars way, way up!

This book was sent to several engineers at the magazine. The author provides a good starting point for someone with a high school education. You will have to get a more advanced text to teach yourself the finer points but this would be the place to start. The fonts used are easy to read.

I did not try the disk so I won't comment. Having the disk is an excellent idea. Two discs with a 30-day trial for AutoCAD and a simple step-by-step manual provides ample tools for self-study.

The only reason why I did not give a 5 was because the text won't provide the more advanced techniques you will need to actually use AutoCAD on the job.

If this review helped, please vote.

Thanks

This is my personal observation and initial experience with the entire book and the software. The comments posted here have nothing to do with how the authors' decision to present his work. I do not attempt to compare one software to another. It is none of my business to ask why one software calls the title block as REFERENCE and the other calls the title block as "SHEET". I am sure your college professor will have a better answer to your question.

The book is a well organized extension of the Bentley's user help file for its "2-D design and drafting." And the authors have well industrial and academic experience.

The included CD in the back of the book (claimed on p. xxi) has material of chapter 1 thru 13 and "17?" (there was no chapter 17 in the textbook! - see p.xvii). Furthermore, the CD presents very meticulous step-by-step hands-on exercises in chapter 1 to 13. And as soon as it gets to 3-D solid modeling (the non-existence chapter 17 in the CD), all you get is some drawings with dimensions. No step-by-step on how to do it! What a waste for a 30 year experienced professor, who could not show how to construct a true 3-D PARAMETRIC solid modeling technique. Boolean is not a true parametric design.

If you are doing 3-D design right now, then turn to page 121 and enjoy a good laugh at the drawing of the complete bicycle assembly design with some 2-D circles and linear lines (notice that we 3D people did hand over the creation of 2-D views to the 3-D parametric drafting with associative dimensioning software more than 10 years ago!)

For 3-D Boolean's design, you will not get much out of this book. Other authors of Microstation V8 such as Andrew L. Anderson (Microstation V8: An introduction to Computer-Aided Design, 2002) would have done the same thing. They failed to recognized the true potential of 3-D parametric technology in Mechanical design. All the presentations are based on the 3-D primitives. Who can proudly claim that a helical spring can be created with 3-D primitives?

Other needed minor improvements such as on page 12 figure 1-15 the authors want you to access the task Navigation/drawing/linear. And for new users, you will get an impression that the task navigation menu is located on the left of the screen. However, that is not the case. The task Navigation is located on the top right corner of the main menu in the latest Microstation V8 XM High security release (XM does not mean a thing! It just sound like some radio station to me!).

And finally, for 2-D people it is a good book to buy so that you can post page 220, 221 and 223 right in front of your available and visible wall so that you can learn and remember all the o,v,T,B,X,Y,D,A,L,RQ,RA,RE,RV,RZ,GT,GK,GA,WA,P,M,I,N,M,C,K,HA,HS,HU,Q,~,? key-in short cuts! I as 3-D people do envy your 2-D drafting brain power! We 3-D parametric solid modeling people do not have to face such problem at all!
Thank you and have a great day!

I have had two versions of this book before, so I knew what I was buying. The last version SE seemed more comprehensive. The book cover was damaged when I received it, however.

This is a great book if you are a now user and need to start from the scratch. There is a plenty of excercises, on the attached CD. On the other hand, it is written for American market, in other words, all measures are in inches and feet, not my favorites.