Customer Reviews

Autodesk Inventor 8 Essentials Plus

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The main material of this book is a rehash/dryrun and listing of what the Inventor user interface and menus do in each chapter. There is not much content on how to actually use the concepts and techniques of Inventor to do real stuff. The authors have decided to put all that stuff on the CD. They have some kind of a compiled html file that walks you thru the techniques of each chapter with busted exercises. The CD is very poorly made with lots of chapters entirely missing and incomplete exercises in many other chapters. The program constantly crashes. I am surprised that a respected name like Autodesk would put out a book like this. That is my two cents worth.

An excellent book, yes it may have some info that can be accessed from the help, but it goes far beyond that, and the advanced section of the book does a great job in exploring the details of the features particular to Inventor, don't forget the tutorial CD that comes with the book, it is another complete training manual in itself. I read the whole book and I did all the tutorials, I am including it in the curriculum of my students, and I recommend it to anyone serious about learning Inventor.

For those who appreciate the format of the first "COMPLETE" AutoCAD companion texts, "Autodesk Inventor 8 Essentials Plus" does for Autodesk Inventor 8 what a true step-by-step AutoCAD manual does for AutoCAD. Coupled with an electronic student workbook CD, each exercise takes you through the book's pertinent chapter and the Autodesk Inventor 8 commands (you need to have the program installed, of course). Every chapter in the text is concluded by a short summary of the commands covered including a "true/false" question segment to check what you have learned.

In conclusion, on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, I rate it a "9" only because of the grayscale images in the chapters which I believe should have been in color. The publishers may have chosen to pass on this because of cost, but now, in an age of "Kindles" and "e-books" this makes no difference.

Excelent material to start to learn Inventor, is easy to undestend.

Luis Villa