CAD and CAM Books

This VHDL book is targeted more to the VHDL beginners. It contains a quite good html-based VHDL workshop and the VHDL '93 online reference. It covers only a little bit the new emerging analog mixed-signal extension to VHDL which is called VHDL-AMS. The VHDL-AMS chapter was very disappointing to me.

If you are looking for a book about VHDL-AMS you're better off with the following book:

"The DESIGNER'S GUIDE TO ANALOG & MIXED-SIGNAL MODELING" "Illustrated with VHDL-AMS and MAST"

Author: Scott Cooper (Avant! Corporation)

What Every Engineer Should Know About Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing: The CAD/CAM Revolution (What Every Engineer Should Know)
by Krouse



This book was good but out of date in minie parts.

I found it to be usefull in steps and princable while having to up date the procedures to todays standards.

As an absolute beginner I naturally purchased this 'for Dummies' book in the assumption that I would be guided through Autocad in the simplest form possible.
But alas no, this book immediatly immersed me in confusion and fustration. With no precise step by step guides or no simple tutorial exercises, the author Mark Middelton has no business teaching to beginners.
He then has the audacity to give himself a five star review on this review page, and whine about any criticism of his book.
I suggest he reads Cheryl R Schrocks 'Exercise Workbook for Beginning Autocad' to experience a true professional teacher in action.

This is a great book for beginners of AutoCad. It takes you step by step through the the most basic operations to the more complex ones. Great book.

AutoCAD is one of the most complex and powerful programs I have ever seen. It's necessary to understand some potentially intimidating concepts, like paper space, xrefs and plotting procedures. After reading previous reviews of this book, I suspect the reviewers may have been disillusioned when they didn't understand everything about the program after reading part of the book.

I know a good deal about this program and I was glad to get a list and read some commentary about what was new and what was unchanged from the last release. For an experienced user, keeping up with the changes is what it's all about.

Middlebrook is clearly very knowledgeable, but remembers what it's like to be a beginner and is able to write from the point of view of someone who is poking the buttons in this program for the first time. There are often several ways to do things with AutoCAD and it was great to see tips about the easiest way for a novice to do them. In addition to the "how to" there is commentary which illuminates the "why" behind the commands, techniques and concepts. You can't get that from the online help. As someone who has tried to explain this program to people myself, I think this is exactly what's needed.

He also writes from a non-AutoDesk point of view. I got the feeling that I was getting good information rather than the company line as well as some tips that I wouldn't expect to find in the program manuals and online help, like how to save a file so that other people who are using AutoCAD R14 can use it.

It's very readable, which is a rare thing considering the technical subject. There is a sense of humor and it is a pleasure to read.

The bottom line is that it's a great way to get up to speed with the changes if you already have experience with AutoCAD, and if I were learning this program for the first time I would definitely want to have this book in order to make sense out of the program.

Are we looking at the same book?! At the risk of sounding like the defensive, whiny author (again!), I humbly submit:

A reader from Mc Lean, VA writes: "I picked up the manual that came with AutoCAD. The manual that came with the software was better than this book!" That's strange, since AutoCAD 2004 doesn't come with a printed manual.

wizard621 from Denver, CO writes: "There are so many typos, grammatical errors and mismatches between the examples and the software...." That's strange, too, since I recently went through the book in order to correct errors in preparation for a new printing. I found exactly five misspellings, no grammatical errors, and a handful of places where the description didn't match the software.

sbruce28 from Sandston, Virginia writes: "Doesn't anyone proof read [sic] anymore?" Yes, I do, the copy editor does, and the proofreader does. This kind of criticism is suspect when it comes from someone who doesn't realize that the verb is spelled "proofread" and who spells "AutoCAD" two different ways, both incorrect, in the same sentence.

I will agree that this book expects readers to be somewhat familiar with a few basic drafting concepts - such as scale, the representation of three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional sheets of paper, and how real-world objects are shown on (printed) technical drawings. If you don't understand or aren't willing to learn a little bit about how technical drawings are presented in your industry, then you probably aren't ready to use a CAD program.

In fact, several parts of the book review basic drafting concepts and connect them to corresponding AutoCAD concepts and practices. For example, Chapter 3 explains how drawing scale (a fundamental drafting concept) relates to drawing scale factor (an essential CAD concept). And Chapter 12 describes how many AutoCAD drafters represent printed lineweights (drafting) with object colors on the screen (CAD).

In my pursuit to learn AutoCAD as quickly as I can, I have purchased the three main tutorial books for AutoCAD 2004.

While AutoCAD 2004 for Dummies by Mark Middlebrook is the most basic of the three (Duh... it's for dummies) it still covers much of the important material in a manner that a complete newbie could probably understand a specific instruction or chapter.

The way Mr. Middlebrook approaches AutoCAD though is pretty tough to comprehend. That is, he spends the entire book discussing various commands and how to approach a drawing, but never walks you through a project.

I found David Frey's book AutoCAD 2004 and AutoCAD LT 2004 a much better instructional book and while only slightly more techie he manages to walk you through a project that lets you truly understand what he's trying to teach you.

My biggest gripe with AutoCAD 2004 for Dummies is the incredible amount of typos! Gawd! I am a high school teacher and this guy would fail an essay that I assign at the high school level. What in the world is he doing writing a book if he can't spell or proofread? Either he or his editor should go back to English class. I see that Mr. Middlebrook himself has weighed in on this. Just so he knows, I'm looking at the fourth printing (I think... The information page says 10 9 8 7 6 5 4. Does that mean it's on the third or fourth printing? I'm not a librarian!) I only mention this because he says he's only found 5 mistakes. I've found at least a dozen pretty obvious ones, and a many, many minor ones.

The single most grievous mistake is on pages 100 and 101, Chapter 5, table 5-1. It is supposed to be a table of various tools you can use to draw objects. Other than the first one, each icon is incorrectly matched with a description! For example, he shows the "copy" tool icon, but then calls it a SPLine and gives the description for a SPLine. I count eight errors in that table alone. If you are truly a newbie to AutoCAD then you might never get it sorted out. This mistake alone merits not purchasing the book or asking of your money back because it's an example of how a "typo" can be critically damaging. No, I am not an English teacher, nor am I overly zealotous toward proofreading. However, I do have only a certain tolerance for typos and when they interfere with my learning the subject, then its time to move on to another resource.

While I have learned things from this book, it is clearly the least useful of the three I have bought. The two Sybex books by Frey and Omura have much more thought and effort put into them and are extremely comprehensive. I'd pick the Frey book first though.

I do not doubt for a second Mr. Middlebrook's knowledge or experience with AutoCAD. He clearly knows his stuff. I just wish he, and his editor, would learn to proofread. That, or hire me to proofread for you! I'm as literate as your editor, computer savvy, and experienced. Look me up.

The Dummies series could really learn from the mistakes made here. I'm done with the Dummies series. There are much better resources out there, at least on the topics that I'm interested in. They've lost my purchases. Good luck though!

Well below the manufacturer's manual. Not worth spending time or money

I felt the book greatly lacked depth into topics. It seemed to only cover some of the remedial basics. It is not a very good choice for someone who really wants to leearn how to effectively use this program. It also does not serve too well as a refence manual.

Autocad LT 97 was the second book I tried to use to learn Autocad. My goal was to learn AutoCad LT by myself. The first book (bought last year) that I tried was AutoCad LT by Omura. It was very difficult to follow for two reasons. First, I needed a book for the extreme novice. Second, Mr. Omura's book is about Autcad release 3.0, which differs greatly from release 14. Mr. Grabowski's book is clearly written, informative, and knowingly focuses on the challenge faced by the beginning CAD student. He starts each section by explaining the goals, and he also shares the perspective enjoyed by the high end CAD person, one who is in it every day. This book is excellent for the beginner and intermediate student. It includes a CD with all the drawings you have to make already done. After making each one of these at least 6 times, I learned even more by opening up the same drawing from the CD, one that was done by an expert. I think you will need at least two books to learn AutoCad LT97 well enough to make money at it.

I am converting from a DOS Cad program with which I am intimately familiar, to AutoCAD LT.

This book gave a useful tutorial guided introduction to the package (although most of the stuff is intuitive if you are familiar with Windows and CAD concepts).

What the book lacks is a detailed index, or in fact much detail at all about CAD operations.

After 2 evenings I already need to buy a more in-depth reference book.

Andrew

I found "AutoCAD LT 97 for Windows 95/NT" to not point out the real potentials and had some statements that it could not do things that it could do very well. In reading the book I felt the author was playing down the importance of AutoCAD LT 97 and its abilities. The book did have some good material to help out a beginner.

If you are looking for a book that will help you understand Visual Lisp - this is NOT it. Page after page of screen shots with a line or two of unhelpful text - you would be much better off just using AutoCAD help. Maybe the next book on VL will do more than scratch the surface.

This book finally brought Descriptive Geometry down to my level - beginner. I was amazed at how this book managed to explain the subject matter in a simple, straight forward way. And the illustrations are great! I took Descriptive Geometry several years ago and did not complete the course because I could not understand what the instructor or the other D.G. textbook (I don't remember the title) were talking about. Now, I wonder why the other book did not say, and illustrate, what this book covers so effortlessly.

This book is of zero educational value. You will not find it useful. Some scattered information without any reasonable relationship. It is a waste of time and money. I am not quite sure why they have decided to publish such a useless book. You cannot even use it as a reference.

I found this book to be a jumble of disconnected terms. After reading the first two chapters I thought the rest of the book can go nowhere but up. I was wrong. The rest of the book maintained its confusing presentations. Even the supplied disk was as confusing as the book. If your looking to get into LISP programming STAY AWAY from this book. I guess I will spend another 30 or 40 dollars and try another LISP programming book.

This by far is the preeminent of its kind. The immeasurable amount of detail that the author covers, leaves no doubt in the readers mind that every facet has been covered. This book is truly a assertion that the author shows no evidence of diffidence. I highly advocate the purchase of this book!

I get this book in college. I am student of CNC studies and machining. This book did not have the knowledge we need and teacher did not like useing it because mistakes in it.
The CD does not work for almost half our class.

Vic

I take exception to the previous reviewer's statement that the average machinist reads at a grade 7 level. He must not confuse his own reading skills with those of others working in the trade.

CNC Workshop is a big disappointment. As the other person pointed out, you can get far better simulators (freeware) from the web. There is very little of use to anyone but highschool kids in this book.

Buy Smid's or Mike Lynch's book for REAL cnc knowledge.

I am a CNC machinist and also conduct CNC training for my company. No book or CNC simulation program I have ever come across is perfect(the world is not perfect). This book and multimedia CD package is no exception, it has a few flaws. I can live with the flaws because the quality and value of the material is super! Nowhere will you find a CNC training package this good at this ridiculously low price!!!

This is not college level text and it shouldn't be. The average machinist reads on a 7th grade reading level. I've used training material costing thousands of dollars and the trainees were so intimidated that half of them struggled. The CNC Workshop package gets rave reviews from the trainees and there is a significant performance increase on the shop floor.

One of the best bargains you will ever find!!

I am not sure what planet the previous reviewer was on, but this is probably the worst CNC text on the market. ALL of the canned cycles are incorrectly described. Most of the programs have errors in them. TAPPING IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED! Radius comp is grossly misrepresented. Partoff and groove programming skipped all-together, and there is no mention of macros, setting offsets, or incremental programming on lathes. Milling codes are used on lathes and the simulator makes an even bigger mess of things.
Anyone who truly understands CNC Programming will come away disappointed. This is a book for highschool kids, nothing more.

WOW double WOW!!! I don't know how these guys do what they have done for the price. First let me say this is a totally unsolicited review of a great training tool. I am journeyman machinist, who teaches CNC operators for a large Fortune 500 company and I also teach at 2 local community colleges. I have over 25 years experience in the field of machining and teaching. One of the colleges recently received a training contract for a small job shop with limited funds, so I got on the net to price a Torcomp product I have used in the past "The CNC Workbook" and I ran across a new product "The CNC Workshop". I sent for a copy figuring same stuff different package, was I shocked, anyone or school with a PC can have a complete CNC training course right out of the box. I have reviewed numerous CNC training materials over the years, and have written my own, but this is the very best ever. I have seen many with prices in the thousands that cannot touch this package. "The CNC Workshop" can be used as part of an instructor lead class or can use by individuals to learn on their own. I am worried about my teaching job once "The CNC Workshop" gets out.

I read this whole book trying to figure out who it was written for, and failed.

To all outward appearance, it seems to address the C++ programmer who, for reasons unknown, has been thrown into the task of creating executable specifications for complex HW/SW systems. Well, it happens. That poor slob's problems are never really addressed.

The authors spend significant time discussing bit-accurate, cycle-accurate, both-accurate, and neither-accurate simulations. Those topics all deserve attention, as does optimization of the model for faster simulation time. The typical programmer, however, just won't be ready for concepts of sensitivity and some of the weirder forms of assignment. Straight-up hardware guys won't get the classing structures, and won't see all the discussion they need to translate statements into cycles; software guys won't get enough of the class hierarchy to follow along, and will need to sit down with someone for a long time to understand why all those fixed-point formats deserve to exist. (You wouldn't believe some of the questions I've gotten. For example, "0.56 isn't a fraction with power-of-two denominator - so why does that scaling logic assume I can just shift?" Lawd lumme, what kids don't learn these days.)

There's not enough here of hardware system analysis for the software guys, and not enough of the C++/SystemC strangeness for a logic designer to grab hold of. On the whole, it looks like a fair answer to a question that I didn't hear asked.

-- wiredweird

This book is not meant to be a introductory book or
about the SystemC language or coding guidelines.
For that please refer to other elementary or primer
book or the user guide available for download from
systemc website.

This book is mainly useful for researchers to understand
the philosophy behind the SystemC language and
interesting problems addressed by the language.

SystemC is my bread and butter and I bought this book with great hopes to understand both the language and the underlying concepts of the language, unfortunately the book provides neither. I think it is a grossly overpriced useless book.

A very good book, if it is used as a reference material, specially for TLM modeling, it helps along with the code for simple_bus available at www.systemc.org. For starters, I will recommend to add more examples in the text of the book as the systemC library is huge. It is sometimes very hard to remove the bugs, if sufficient examples are not available. A suggestion will be to add a functional model example of a CPU based system design, so that the ideas can be extracted out of the text easily.

I am a active user of SystemC, so had great hopes for either a real reference or even an introductory book. Unfortunately, this book provides neither a introduction to the language, real world help for coders, or even reference material. The free manual with SystemC better then this. Worse, it badly needs editing to clean up awkward sentances.

Generally I expense technical books, but I feel too guilty to bear the company with this overpriced book. Back it goes.

This book provides plenty of examples, grouped in a context in which they will be used. Some Nurbs, modeling theory and troubleshooting tips. Enough to answer questions as you go through the text but not so much as to be overwhelming.

The only fly in the ointment in my opinion was the chapter on Flamingo. I thought that chapter was organized in an awkward manner.

Do not buy this book. Instead buy the online Rhino video tips from Mcneel. I bought this book expecting to learn something only to discover that the stuff I learned was useless.

The author spends the majority of the book explaining in detail--like the help menu--the various functions of Rhino, and NURBS in general. He then attempts to use every possible command to create the joystick, toothbrush, toy car, and shoe projects.

Numerous omissions and typos made for a very frustrating read. Mislabeled drawings and missing or erroneous instructions made exercises difficult to follow. Fundamental exercises were superficial and fragmented without logical development or context making retention difficult. Rhino's supplied Level 1 and Level 2 Training Materials are far superior in all regards. Don't waste your time and money. The publisher and author were e-mailed regarding problems but no response.

This book has a good overview and general explanation of how things are designed in 3D. It takes you through the commands and tools step by step, with surprisingly few misprints. The CD that comes with it has the free demo program, and some tutorials. However, the lack of a glossary makes it an unnecessarily tedious read for anyone not familiar with advanced geometry and math. My dictionary wasn't much help. More serious omissions became apparent as I tried to use Rhino, like the very short entry on Boolean Unions. He doesn't even mention that they can fail to work, much less offer any solutions. This book saved me some time learning basic tools, and helped with general concepts, and is probably better than not having a text at all. I haven't bought Rhino yet, so I can't compare this to the manual that comes with the program.

This book is a disappointment in comparison to other Sybex "Mastering" series publications. Petroutsos' Mastering Visual Basic is a must if one is to take advantage of many examples shown in "Mastering AutoCAD VBA". The rudimentary AutoCAD examples left a lot to be desired.

The book assumes the reader is a novice at both AutoCAD and VBA. This is good, since other books seem to assume a lot of prior knowledge. Certain topics which would seem to demand more explanation, such as a transformation matrix, are left without any. Still, I recommend this book for beginner.

Clear, simple code and very basic operations make this a good primer for those just starting. In order to actually write the app you had in mind, you will need much more information( Joe Sutphin's book at least). Even on a beginners level much is left out --- filtering selection sets, DXF codes, classes, .DLL's, the API, just for starters. As a low end intermediate user the book is a disappointment, but I'll keep it anyway.

Yes, this book is for beginners, but geared more toward AutoCAD (and perhaps programming) novices rather than toward those wishing to systematically learn and employ VBA in AutoCAD. This is in contradisctinction to its back cover description, which says "[this book] is written specifically for AutoCAD users." (And the book description in the editorial above is even more misleadling!) Topics and headings are arranged around AutoCAD, not around VBA, as though the subject is AutoCAD, not VBA. In addition, code may reference other code from two or three chapters back, but with needed intermediate changes found only one or two chapters back. Too many such 'goto' statements make this book tedious even for someone wanting to focus his new VBA skills on a particular aspect of AutoCAD. The reader is forced to delve into every chapter in order to gain just one or two necessary--but unlabeled--points about VBA buried within the pages. (And don't expect the accompanying CD to be of any help here. Instead of including the necessary VBA projects--.dvb files--it merely includes the listings in the chapters as text, sans the changes needed to make 'em work!) I'm still looking for the book that will lead one through VBA (with bold references to important steps) using AutoCAD as the teaching environment. If the author had paid more attention to the VBA side of the equation, I'm sure I would have given this book a much higher rating. It would appear that this book (written by a professor) was really designed to supplement a semester course in learning some basics of AutoCAD with reference to VBA. It needs major input from an instructor. It certainly can't do the job by itself.

Anyone with any experience running simulation will not find anything in this book besides frustration. System C examples are woefully incomplete, without even one useful example. The authors attempt to describe semi advanced techniques without even laying out the basics of instantiating a complete test bench structure properly. About the only thing useful are flow charts of a proper testbench.

Practical book with some good examples we could use in our training. It will be more helpful if the examples are converted to latest versions of SystemC.

This book is very poorly written. I don't know how it got past editors, but it is full of grammatical errors (about 5-10 per page), and unfortunately the errors get in the way of reading the material. Explanations are also poor, and knowledge is assumed without prior explanation. They even describe files that are not in the book itself, but are only visible from a web site! Some sentences make no sense at all. The text sometimes refers to the wrong figures. However, they do try and be comprehensive, and cover a huge amount of practical material. It is short on theory or any justification for many of the assertions they make. Some almost throw-away comments indicate they know their stuff well, but this book is very much for advanced practitioners only. I can't help feeling that some of it was directly transcribed from notes they made to themselves when they were bored in meetings. They tried to use previous projects as real-world examples, but the examples are so complex that you can't follow them unless you have expertise in various areas already (e.g. OC-48, OC-192, ATM, etc).