Customer Reviews

Civil Drafting Technology (With CD-ROM)

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

 

 

I purchased this book with the hopes that it would help me understand civil drafting. There is no answer section to check my work. So,,,I do not know if I am on the right track with my understanding.
Does anyone know if there is a solutions manual?

This book contains a lot of good information about maps. We are using it in a topographical drafting class. I have learned a lot about a map that I had no idea even existed.

Due to some of the unreasonably negative reviews of this product on this site, I was a bit wary of this book. However, I gave it a shot anyway and it turned out to be *exactly* what I wanted. I have a certificate in general AutoCAD drafting, but I wanted to get more specifics about civil drafting since that is the field I am planning to get into. I was extremely pleased to find that it was well-written, virtually free of grammatical/typograhical errors, and full of really great maps, figures, and civil engineering drawings.

The book, a general introduction to the discipline of civil engineering drafting, is formatted as a textbook with problems, exercises, and a test at the end of the chapters. It starts with an introduction to cartography, civil drafting, and CAD, followed by a discussion of different types of scale and their uses. A section on surveying fundamentals covers geodesy (shape and size of earth), angular measurements and traverses, and gps, as well as the general theory of importing raw survey data into a drawing. A section on location and direction discusses azimuth, bearing, and magnetic declination, and how they relate to civil drafting. Legal descriptions, including metes & bounds and township & range are covered, as well a section on contour lines. There are also sections on alignments, profiles, and earthwork, which I found to be particularly helpful because they are topics somewhat unique to civil drafting which I did not know much about. The book concludes with discussions of civil engineering drafting standards and an overview of geographic information systems.

The author states up front that this book is not intended to give detailed instructions and descriptions of how to carry out operations using a specific CAD program (I am actually using another book for that purpose: Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 by James Wedding PE, and Scott McEachron along with a student version of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 that I purchased at my university). The original hand-drawing techniques of some of the concepts are discussed (in addition to CAD practices), which is interesting because it puts them into historical context.

I am glad to have the background I got from reading Civil Drafting Technology and I expect it will be a great reference for me in the future.

This was a required book for class and it didn't live up to my high standards. There is no fluidity to this book. I hope the drafters who helped write this book are better at planning road ways than planning the order of the chapters this book has. The chapters jump around too much for my liking. This book, however, is ADDA certified.

When I read the word Drafting in the title I assumed this book would focus on civil drafting as it applies to modern (CAD) technology. Instead there are many references to manual drafting which few drafters use any more. A better title would leave the technology out of the title and substitute the word theory, thus letting the buyer know that this is a generic overview of civil drafting theory, not a book that a CAD operator will get much use out of.

In my estimation this book has a Value of around thirty dollars only. Unfortunately, pricing trends seem to indicate that any words committed to print by the The Gods (engineers, programmers, etc.) are worth their weight in gold, regardless of their value.

SO far a great book. Shipped really fast, was in perfect shape as noted, I have no disappointments with the sellers.