Customer Reviews

AutoCAD & AutoCAD LT All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

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When you are first starting to use AutoCAD, you get to the point where you are looking at a basically bare screen with a whole bunch of control icons around the edges. What do you do then? Just simply getting the first line drawn is a confusing task.

In this book the authors have applied the full range of the 'For Dummies' books style guidelines to produce a book that gets you working in AutoCAD just as fast as possible. It still takes them over fifty pages to get started drawing a picture, but that first fifty pages gives you a lot, an awful lot, of basic information. So often I find that computer books leave out this first fifty pages that explain just what it is that we are trying to do. Plow through it. It's material that you will need to know sooner or later, probably sooner, and it's really not that bad.

As a simple summary about this book. I like the 'For Dummies' style, and if I were trying to get started in AutoCAD, it's where I would start.

It's a big book, almost 800 pages, but a lot of details about Autocad are included. You'll be productive before you get down to the customizing and programming chapters.

This is the book I use for quick reference when the latest version of AutoCAD comes out. They always seem to change things around and the help in the program is poor at best. This book makes it easy to find the commands for the common stuff and I use the AutoCAD Bible for the more complicated commands.

This book provides lots of good information, but it is truly written for dummies. By that I mean that the book is really dummed down with very specific instructions on doing things like opening the program, saving a file, etc.

There are lots of great tips scattered throughout the book. However, they will be difficult to find again without highlighting the book the first time you read it.

The author seems to assume that the reader has experience in AutoCad. This assumption lends the book towards not providing exercises on how to use the program. Such exercises would have made the book much more useful.

The bottom line: The AutoCad software is a big let down in the context sensitive help. A good instruction book is needed - but this is not it. If you can't find a better book, get this one. But, do the best you can to find a book that walks the reader through using the program with exercises.