Customer Reviews

Using Autodesk Inventor

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is written to R3. Now you may download appendices from Autodeskpress online companion website to update the book to R4.

This book is a very comprehensive tutorial for the fledgling solid modeler. The exercises are well developed and always preceeded by a thorough introduction. The tutorials and documentation included with the Inventor 3 software are barely adaquate to introduce real-world modeling. In contrast, Cheng's book is a great tool for getting up to speed. The cost of the book is a small price to pay for the time it will save you!

As a student in industrial design I found that this book do has a good balance on both concepts and tutorials, especially on all those parametric solid modeling, assembly modeling, and sheet metal modeling. The free-of-charge online companion is the best I ever found. It's free and it's user friendly. The Pack and Go, epicyclic mechanism and adaptive assembly tutorials are especially interesting and useful. They help me solve a lot of real world problems when I am doing my part time job. I recommend to save your money and use this book for both R3 and R4.

This book provides a holistic view on using Autodesk Inventor in real-world application. You will learn various key concepts such as parametric solid modeling, assembly modeling, sheet metal modeling, and engineering drafting, and all the advanced techniques in modeling. Accompanying this book is a CD with which you learn using Autodesk Inventor right-away. If you are a college student or a K12 student, you are elligible to purchase Inventor at a very low student price.

I plan to use "Autodesk Inventor" as an instructional textbook in my Advanced CAD Class during the 2001-2002 school year. I have been exploring the material in this text during my free time (during this summer of 2001). I feel that the upper level high school students using this text will not only be able to construct the 3-D models detailed in this book but will enjoy learning the use of the Autodesk Inventor software.

I wish to thank Mr. Ron K. C. Cheng for writing this book. My hat is off to you. Although the "Food Grinder" took a good deal of time and patience on my part (to work through), it was a great exercise.

I highly recommend this book for any educator who wishes to instruct 3-D modeling with the use of AutoDesk Inventor.

Don't know zip about Inventor? This is your book. It's a great collection of lessons. However...it just doesn't cut it for the user who's got a specific question. For instance, I've got a multi-part drawing with a lot of external references such as fasteners and commercial parts that are stored in a variety of locations. I need to send the whole thing to an associate. How? I can't just copy the top assy drawing because it doesn't have the associations, that's in a wholely different file. The answer is to use a command called packngo. It's located, however, in Windows Explorer! And I just couldn't find any reference whatsoever to this command in the book.

Several other similar instances tell me that this is good book for the beginning, working alone, never-used-Inventor student but not the on-the-job engineer.

As to the on-line R4 update, it's the same format, i.e. lessons. But there's no index so locating the relevant info is a dicey proposition and knowing what the differences are between R3 and R4 is nigh-on impossible.

I would recommend waiting for the R4 edition if you plan on using that software.

The specific question on ZIP can be found in Chapter 1 of the online companion. It is the Pack and Go Wizard that zips the entire directory into a compressed file. Besides, the R4 new features and tutorials on the new features are also found in the online companion, which has six chapters corresponding to the chapters in the book.

This book is absolute garbage!
The whole book is a tutorial with a lot of example problems for the user to solve. That's great!! The problem is when they LEAVE OUT very important measurements for you to complete the examples. So I've spent hours and hours working on one and now I can't finish it because they've FAILED to inlcude some very key data. Good job Thomson Learning!! You've successfully pushed yet another incomplete book out the door without so much as a decent proof read. Unbelieveable!!

I decided to purchase this book largely based on the positive reviews that I saw on Amazon. The ugly and generic cover kind of turned me off but everybody said it was great so I went ahead bought it.

Boy was I disappointed.

The fact that they obviously just slapped on "Inventor 10" to their Inventor 9(or lower) book stands out a lot. Many of the tool bars have changed/rearranged so it takes some looking around to go through the tutorials. Yes it may only cost me a few minutes for each time I have to do this, but if I'm shelling out ~$100 for a book it would have been nicer to know they put more of an effort in updating it other than finding and replacing "Inventor 9" with "Inventor 10".

They don't even go over Inventor Studio, which is a very large addition and selling point of Inventor 10+!

Other then those obvious translation issues it is a very solid book, and if I was using this for the correct version it was originally written for I would have been very very happy.

In the end this may have been a great book for whatever original version it was written for, but just slapping on "Inventor 10" and sticking a $100 price tag on the book isn't my idea of a great book.

Do yourself a favor, buy a book catered toward this specific version or newer. Or just buy the Inventor 9 book @ 50% of what this costs, it's the same stuff! ><