Customer Reviews

Engineering Design with SolidWorks 2006 and MultiMedia CD

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

 

 

This is the first SW book that I purchased. The book is awesome! The layout is simple to follow, it provides great step by step instructions with clear screen illustrations in each area. The included book CD is great to watch and learn the proper design techniques for each feature. I found myself watching the movies on the book's CD as the mating techniques and the number of components became more challenging at my experience level. It's definitely worth a look. It is clear and to the point.

I was informed to purchase this book by my colleagues, which they had used the older 2004 version in the past. This is money well spent. I contacted the authors and requested additional assistance. They were extremely helpful and knowledgeable and supplied me with a wealth of information, contacts and ideas for my project.

I contacted my local SW VAR and requested information on which book is the best to learn SolidWorks. I had the SW Hands on test drive book and wanted a second book that provided additional in depth information. This is a great book. The book is extremely well written, very intuitive and easy to follow. The book covers key features such as: Extruded, Revolved, Dome, Shell, Fillet, Hole Wizard and Circular Pattern to name a few. The section on Sheet metal was engaging. This is a keeper and a great reference book for any designer or engineer that uses SW!

I started using SolidWorks three months ago. SolidWorks is a great product. I work for a small engineering consulting company that does not have money for training. I'm the only design engineer using SW.

I read numerous book reviews on Amazon. I purchase this book, and it was the best thing that I could have done, to increase my knowledge of the software. I was looking for a hands-on book, that was easy to read and follow, and that would provide me with a solid understanding and foundation. This is the one.

The book layout is awesome. It provides a great step by step approach with tons of pictures to enforce the command structure. Each command is identified in bold letters. It is a great book to learn SolidWorks.

Note: I contacted the authors through their publisher, and they were great in providing additional information to me in a key design area. Thank you. This saved a job for us.

Overall, when considered as an introduction to Solidworks, it does a pretty good job of slowly bringing the student into understanding it. Although, I have found that the manner in which the book goes about teaching is rather slow. I understand why it guides the student step by step by step in order to show them the correct way of doing things, but this quickly gets somewhat boring. But, like I said, overall this is an excellent book to introduce you to the very basics of Solidworks.

I purchased this textbook because it was required for an introductory Solidworks class at my local community college. Given the positive reviews, I had high hopes for the book. While the book does seem to contain quite a bit of information, I found that the author's writing style combined with poor editing made for a very difficult read.

Each chapter starts out with a list of "Project Objectives" as well as a "Project Overview" and a "Project Situation". More often than not, these three sections are a complete muddle. If you're not familiar with 3D CAD, much of the terminology won't make sense... until you've completed the chapter. The "Project Situation" is often very contrived; I found these sections to be completely useless. Once the preliminary confusion is out of the way, the chapter proceeds through the, literally, 600-1000 steps necessary to complete the project. Most steps are a single sentence long. There is very little prose or explanation included with the steps. When you do encounter the odd paragraph, expect it to be at most 2-4 sentences long. The chapter wraps up with a "Project Summary", "Project Terminology", "Questions", and "Exercises".

If you complete the thousands of detailed steps necessary to complete the projects described in the book, you will have used many of Solidworks' features. Unfortunately, the lack of explanatory text will mean that you won't necessarily know why you've constructed a model using a particular series of steps nor whether they are the optimal steps to use in a future situation. Poor typography, fully-capitalized DOS-like filenames, and uninteresting projects only add to the disappointment.

For a better Solidworks tutorial and reference, I suggest Matt Lombard's SolidWorks 2007 Bible as a more readable alternative to this book.

the product did not come with all of its components, its multimedia cd.