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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
good tutorial, but poorly edited, October 9, 2010
This review is from: Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011: No Experience Required (Paperback)
Although I was proficient with AutoCAD, I didn't have any experience with Revit before I purchased this book. I have now gone through the entire volume, reading every word and following along with every example.
The book takes the form of a step-by-step tutorial: the author gives you instructions, and you follow his instructions in order to learn the software. For the most part, this system works well. The tutorial addresses most aspects of Revit, and by the end of the book I felt that I could use the software proficiently in an office environment. The author gives good explanations of why you are doing each process, although he omits to tell you the purpose of each step. (For example, he might tell you to click a specific checkbox in a dialog box, without explaining what that checkbox is for. Brief parenthetic comments to that end would have been nice.)
There is a real problem with quality control in the book, however. Other readers have commented on the east-west discrepancies in the book; the author might tell you to modify the east entrance when he means the west entrance, for example. This flaw didn't really bother me, as there are plenty of helpful illustrations in the book, so it's usually possible to figure out which side of the building he really means. The bigger issue has to do with the sloppiness of the tutorial procedures. Many of the steps that the author tells you to make do not work properly. That is, he might say "do X, and Y will happen," but the program might not allow you to do X, or when you do X, Y does NOT happen. Other times, the instructions are confusing or even incomplete. I once spent 30 minutes trying to troubleshoot my model, only to realize that the author had omitted to tell me to click a certain button. These errors are rare in the first few chapters, but become increasingly common later in the book. Chapter 21 is particularly bad in this regard; the author even has you modifying a wall that does not exist, if you follow his instructions! It seems likely that the book's procedures were never independently tested by someone untrained in Revit.
I don't know if there is a better book for learning Revit. This one will certainly work - just be prepared to encounter a fair number of unexpected problems, and to figure out solutions to them on your own.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific Beginners Book and Good Reference, September 10, 2010
This review is from: Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011: No Experience Required (Paperback)
I taught myself Revit with one 24 hour beginners class from Autodesk, the online tutorials from Autodesk University, helpful information on the online Autodesk Users Group and the 2010 version of this book. It involved a lot of diligent study and included doing many of the step by step lessons and tutorials in this book.
I started in June 2010 and by August 2010 I banged out a complete design and set of construction drawings for a house renovation and expansion. Since then I have completed many other projects using Revit and continually refer to topics in this book.
There are other, better reference books for more complex Revit topics but for beginners learning the software this book can't be beat.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Decent instruction if you can handle inaccuracies., February 2, 2011
This review is from: Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011: No Experience Required (Paperback)
I started my Revit instruction with 'Learning Revit Architecture 2010' (even though I am using 2011) published by Autodesk. The book is easy to follow, the division of instruction and practice exercises was nice, and it provided all of basic information one would need to be familiar with Revit. There were one or two examples that gave incorrect instructions, but they were small and it could be a difference in version (since it was a 2010 book).
Cut to Revit 2011: No Experience Required. Flipping through this book, it seemed like a good progression from the Autodesk guide. Although it covers a lot of the same ground, instead of explaining the tools in depth, you jump into using them by building a medium-sized office building. The later chapters deal with some more advanced topics not covered in the Autodesk book.
Throughout the book are exercises to build said building, but they are embedded within the text, which is annoying if you want to just jump ahead to the exercise and skip the written set-up (which you probably will since the author feels like a software instruction book should be funny). The first couple of chapters are pain-free, but once you get to Chapter 3, the examples start to fall apart. At least once per chapter, one of the exercises will have errors in instruction that usually require anywhere from 10-20 minutes online trying to resolve. More than once a wall appears in a later chapter that was not instructed to draw in a previous chapter. Many of the errors can only be resolved by employing skills that are not yet covered in this book; luckily I had read the Autodesk book and knew how to fix them. No Experience Required? Indeed.
The last thing that irked me was that the author continually reminds you to "check dimensions" and make sure that everything is located accurately, yet very rarely do the reference images display dimensions that are clear to read. I would have preferred to have a couple of images of the model and related drawings at the end of each chapter that displayed the finished building at that point, so you could check your progress with the book. Not only would this help the user double check they located walls correctly, I think it would also help the author to double check his work and make sure the instructions actually yield the results he intended. Considering that this is the exact same model used for the 2010 edition, I am left wondering if not much was amended between the 2 versions.
All in all, I would not recommend this book for users who have never used Revit before. The frequent inaccuracies, especially in early chapters, will likely leave most new users confused and frustrated. Start with the Autodesk book and then progress to this so you have a better idea of how to trouble shoot problems when they occur... because they will.
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