CAD and CAM Books

This book is far from ideal. My background is computers, and I'm used to documentation being written to tell me what I need to know, quickly. This book is a set of tutorials--it is NOT a reference. When I need to know something specific this book is nearly useless. If you don't really know what you want to learn and want to be led through a series of exercises this book may be useful. However, if you're starting from zero, I recommend "AutoCAD 2002: No Experience Required" by David Frey, which is written much more clearly and will more quickly give you a taste of all (or most) elements of AutoCAD. Omura's book required spending too much time on things I didn't need to know to get to what I did want to know.

Another major complaint is that this book is loaded with typos and errors. Clearly it was not proofread. Numbers in examples don't add up (example: last paragraph on p. 221: two times twelve is NOT forty-eight), assumptions are made about all settings being in their default positions (not safe if you're using someone else's computer) and commands that have not yet been covered are referred to. In the chapter on AutoLISP both the first and the second example programs have typos in them and if you don't have a programming background you could tear your hair out trying to figure out what you're doing wrong. I started to keep a list of all the errors I found, but it seems there's one every couple of pages. (Incidentally, I didn't find a single typo in David Frey's book, and I went through the entire thing.)

Finally I should mention the CD-ROM. The first thing this CD-ROM did was crash the computer I was using. After rebooting--twice--it still crashed when trying to run the installation program. This was running a recent installation of Windows ME with over 500MB of RAM. I was able to copy the example files off the disc manually, but this whole package clearly meets a very low standard of quality assurance.

Fortunately I'm about at the point where I'm able to find what I need in the online documentation, and this book was not completely useless in teaching me enough to reach that point. However, I find it hard to imagine there isn't something far superior out there that I could have used instead. This book could be worse, but it's far from ideal.

I have been using Simulink ever since it's born in early 90's. I got this book because I have "Mastering Simulink 2" from the same authors. Few years ago, Simulink official manual is poorly written in the sense that a lot of important information were left out. "Master Simulink 2" was useful then. Starting Matlab 6, MathWorks has put in a big effort to roll out its official manuals, especially on Simulink 4. Therefore, this new book has little value (no more information) on top of the existing manuals.

This book has a few nontrivial c-mex file examples that are pretty much the only useful pages I can get some benefits from. The official manual "Writing S-Function" covers a lot more detailed materials to show user how to write c-mex, Fortran-mex, Ada-mex files with Simulink, which is the essence of building any real world design applicaiton. The book did not talk about Simulink Performance Tools, which is a very useful side product to work with Simulink.

Overall, for any beginner who can not access the official MATLAB 6/Simulink 4 manuals, this book is a good choice to solve some simple "textbook" problems. But I doubt anyone can learn much from this book to accomplish serious, pratical, and real-world design applications.

The book is great...very good examples. But MathCad 14 has serious computational problems. Go back and use MathCad 13.

This book works well for a newcomer to Microstation. However, some of the material covering the advanced topics becomes confusing. If you are already a user, look elsewhere.

I had just received this book from the post a few days ago. After fliping thru' the contents, the following are my sincere comments:
1. It is well written and easily understood by those with experience but not to the novice of the subject.
2. It is a solid practical approach which should be useful for those who wants to further their knowledge and experience in 3D modelling.
3. Only complain is that the author should have a diagramatic approach of the lessons to cater for new starters of the subject.

I read the book cover to cover. It seems that authors collected their ideas presented in their IEEE papers and made them into a book. It does not cover extraction of inductance. It assuems that we know the parasetic inductance values. All of the analysis is compared to a prop. tool at IBM that a third party can not access to assess the merit of analysis. The ideas introduced in one chapter and visited over and over again in later chapters. However, if you can spare the money for the price of this book, it a nice book to have for inductance related collection and as a formula reference.

This is one of the few books to provide an introduction to PSpice under OrCAD. To be fair, it does cover the basics and it does so to a greater extent than might be considered necessary. If you are a practising engineer looking to get up to speed on the fundamentals of using PSpice (as I am) you will probably find the elementary content and presentation far too simplistic and unecessary. It looks as if it were aimed more at introductory electronics students, getting to grips with this software for the first time. Even allowing for this the text is weak in some areas: for example, electrical phasors are sometimes incorrectly referred to as 'physors'. Who proof-read this? They must have been asleep.

The most useful aspect of the book for new PSpice users are the hints scattered in 'Simulation Notes' throughout. These provide useful tips and hints on how to accomplish various fundamental tasks, such as changing axis settings and modifying traces.

In short, this book has some value to the new PSpice user, but is very poorly produced and overly simple for most engineering students or engineers who may need a basic PSpice reference. The presentation level is low; the whole thing is not really produced to a professional standard but looks as if it were a collection of lecture notes which got turned into a book after some very minimal editing. It's somewhat useful to learn some of the necessary PSpice tricks but falls very short when you consider how much better this topic could have been covered with a more rigorous and less dumbed-down style.

Although it provides a comparison of the different languages which you might use for modeling analog systems (Verilog-A, VHDL-AMS, spice, etc), this book is heavily oriented toward MAST. It has many examples, but all use MAST as the description language. As such, this book is likely to be of little or no use to someone using Verilog-A, spice, etc. If you use MAST, however, this book is probably all you'll ever need.

This book has some very good ideas and can point you in the right direction. However, they would have been better off going into a bit more detail in some of the examples. For instance, with a bit more Sketcher information, you could work along with their problems without all the guesswork. My feeling is that they teach you as if you already have mastered the subject; I spent several hours pouring over the PTC reference books. It's a good reference for the intermediate user, but by no means is it the end-all of Pro/E books.

just to know about the books and its contents