Rating: 
Summary: A door stop at 800 pages plus
Review: A great door stop. 800 pages plus and still counting. The book is very confusing to the new user. I guess the Advance user would understand the reason why the author shifts from topic to topic without any great clarification. There are numerous tutorials in the book, but I also found numerous mistakes, typos and areas that just ended without any explanations. I do not think that this book is a step-by-step book. If it is, he missed every other step for a new user. I found more help on the SolidWorks Website. The author did use a number of figures in the book to illustrate this ideas, but again it was not sufficient for the new user. I have been using SolidWorks for three months, and the books is now sitting on the floor under my desk so it will not take up any value space on my book shelf in my office.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best text to learn SolidWorks
Review: I am a CAD instructor in one of the colleges in Canada and I have been teaching SolidWorks since, 1999. This semester we have adopted the book "SolidWorks for Designers Release 2003" by Sham Tickoo. My students and me had a great time in the class with this book. The examples and the tutorials are really great, except for some typos. Over all, it was a good decision to adopt this book.
I visited amazon.com, which is one of the main stores for our students to buy the books and found some negative reviews about this book. All of us feel that they are a total injustice to the book. This book is, without any doubt, one of the best and is worth all the money.
To sum it up, at least me and my students are fully satisfied with this book and we are looking forward to Sham's book on SolidWorks 2004.
Rating:
Summary: A great resource of knowledge for SolidWorks 2003
Review: I am a full time teaching faculty with one of the CAD training centers in Ontario. Just like most of the other institutes, we were also was looking for some good teaching resource for SolidWorks. We tried a number of textbooks and then finally we bought this one by Sham Tickoo. This is a good text with in depth explanation of all the SolidWorks commands. The students appreciated the tutorials and enjoyed creating all those models. I also had a very easy time because all the tools that are required to teach a class on SolidWorks were provided to me for free by the author. I am sure after going through this book and the free teaching aids, a faculty member can never use any other book to teach a class.
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as his other Pro/E books
Review: I am a professor that teaches 3D design at a leading University in CA. I had a few students that read reviews on Amazon.com on this book and recommended the book to me. I received a free review copy of this book from my book rep. I have been using and teaching SolidWorks for the past three years. It is a great 3D design tool. The Author of "SolidWorks for Designers Release 2003", Sham Tickoo has a good name in the industry for CAD and Pro/E. At reviewing the book, I would not adopt this book for my class even if my book representative provided the books to me for free. The book is riddled with mistakes, incomplete areas and solutions. Sham uses the term, "Real world" examples in each chapter. I question if he really understands the word of "Real World" with his examples and solutions that is provided in the book. A good part of this book is that Sham provides teaching aids, but I question the quality of these tools for faculty or for individual users.
Rating:
Summary: Essential for Industrial Designers
Review: I am a team leader in a Graphics Designing and Modeling company in Spain. My team has learnt SolidWorks 2003 by starting from scratch using this book within a record period of time without any help of an instructor or faculty. Actually the challenge was to train our team of designer on SolidWorks so that they can handle the new projectsa at the earliest. The best part of this book is the step-by-step explanation of creating the models; the mechanical projects also helped my team a lot to learn SolidWorks. I suggest this book as an essential for industrial designers if they are serious to learn and work efficiently in SolidWorks.
Rating:
Summary: This is a GOOD textbook for learning SolidWorks
Review: I don't really care about reviewing the books or writing about them. However, after watching and reading some of the reviews, I am compelled to express my two cents worth of opinion. I think these one and two star reviews are coming from a single source and I have the reasons to believe that the sole purpose of these reviews is to lower the ratings of this book. I have gone through this book and I do not find any major mistakes in it. Being a author myself, you cannot write a textbook that is customized for every reader. You assume the reader has some common sense and some design knowledge to understand how one can use solid modeling as a design tool. I would urge the readers to make their own judgment about this book and not be swayed by some maniacs out there who have no business to be in the design field in the first place. This is a good comprehensive book on SolidWorks and the author has done a great job. I give it 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Good text on SolidWorks
Review: I got hold of this new textbook on SolidWorks 2003. I liked the methodology used by the author to teach SolidWorks. There are numerous tutorials in this book with step by step explanation. All the solid models in the book have 2D as well as 3D views ... this helps me to understand the model before creating it.
I bought this book after my instructor at school recommended it to me. I recommend this book to all the students who want to learn SolidWorks. I liked this book for the effort put in by the author in explaining various commands of SolidWorks.
Rating:
Summary: Effective to learn SolidWorks
Review: I read this book end to end, except for some portion. This book is interesting and the tutorials are really effective to teach anyone SolidWorks. The tutorials about using contour selection are good and makes modeling really easy. Apart from some typos here and there, the book is worth buying. I like both the Drawing views chapters the most. They cover all the options of generating drawing views and most of the related options, which is lacking in most of the books I have seen (well frankly, I seen a few of them and they lack a lot of explanation of detailing and darfting). This covers all those topics, which makes it one of my favorites.
Rating:
Summary: You get a treasure of free resources with this book
Review: I work for a CAD solution providing company in San Francisco. The training department of our company is using the books authored by Sham since a long time. Our company conduct the training sessions of our engineers from time to time to update them on the latest CAD/CAM technology. We are also using his book on SolidWorks and our training department has recommended this book to all our engineers who have attended the updating session on SolidWorks 2003. The best part of this book is the chapters on the advanced topics that are available for free download. These advanced chapters include sheet metal design, mold design and so on, which is the lifeline of industry these days. To sum it up me and the training department of our company highly recommends this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good book! Text is explained using Graphics
Review: This book explains the fundamentals of solid modeling by using the SolidWorks package in most efficient way. After going through this book, you not only learn SolidWorks but also learn to use it efficiently. A great number of graphics are used by the author, which has made the understanding of difficult concepts easy. The creations of solid models are explained step by step. This has helped me to create solid models on my own. My plan is that after learning the basic chapters from the book I will download the free advanced chapters from the author's website. So in this way, I get the full tutorial kit of SolidWorks from the author. This will help me to achieve my goal of becoming a good designer.
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