Customer Reviews

Using AutoCAD 2004: Basics

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Both Basic and Advanced are essentially classroom textbooks, with textbook-style exercises that are abstract and do not follow any one project. Personally, I prefer "learning by example" when the tutorials and exercises are part of a larger project - it's more important to learn how to employ the concepts and tools in a realistic project setting, as opposed to a bunch of unrelated topic-specific exercises.

Also, the included CDROMs border on useless. There are only a few dozen sample drawings per volume and not much else. The exercises consist of "open drawingx.dwg from the CD and perform one or two operations on it." Surely, with 650MB of available space, more could have been included than a few megabytes of drawing files.

These books do get good marks for thoroughly covering all the topics. The lack of real-world application severely limits these books' usefulness for self-learners.

I am currently taking an AutoCAD class in my school and this book acts as a good guide. The teacher filters out most of the exercises to more relevant ones. It doesn't make for a good reference though, so if you want a reference manual, I would stay clear of this one. Every year they make a new one of these books, and they are almost identical for the exception of that they have little tid bits on "new in 2005" or "new in 2006". Don't bother buying this book every time a new version of AutoCAD comes out either, they are all almost the same.

That being said, it works well to guide people that are learning autoCAD on the right path. The tutorials show you multiple ways of achieving the same thing, so the user can deside what way suits him/her best and continue on from there (personally I love using the command prompt). I'm about 3/4 of the way through the book right now, and it's done a good job giving me the BASICS of autoCAD, I don't think this book would be very good for teaching advanced principles, however I don't think it was advertised to do so.

So basically.

If you are learning, it's good
If you already know autoCAD, it's not good
If you already have an book covering an older year of AutoCAD, don't bother buying a newer book

Hope this helps!