Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire Tutorial and Multimedia CD

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to follow- poorly written
Review: Not a well-written step-by-step book. Hard to follow and complete the assignments. Low-level publication quality at best. Illustrations are poorly captured.

Rating:
Summary: Widely Used for Pro/ENGINEER training
Review: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire Tutorial and MultiMedia CD is really two books in one. The text portion is tutorial in style and is designed to illustrate the features of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. The MultiMedia CD, that is included with the book, contains an audio/visual presentation of the tutorial exercises contained in the book. A good approach to this book is to first view the CD to get a feel for how the software looks, then work through the tutorial exercises.

This book contains eleven tutorial lessons as follows:

1. User Interface, View Controls and Model Structure
2. Creating a Simple Object: Datum Planes, Sketcher
3. Creating a Simple Object: Holes, Chamfer, Rounds, Model Trees, Dimensions, etc.
4. Revolved Protrusions, Mirror Copies, Rounds, and Chamfers
5. Modeling Utilities and the 3 R's
6. Datums and Sketcher Tools
7. Patterns and Copies
8. Engineering Drawings
9. Assembly Fundamentals
10. Assembly Operations
11. Sweeps and Blends

The Appendix contains information on interface customization.

This book is, without a doubt, the best selling Pro/ENGINEER book available. It is widely used throughout the United States and Canada by colleges and universities that want to introduce their students to Pro/ENGINEER. If a school close to you teaches Pro/ENGINEER, contact the professor in charge of the course and ask what textbook he is using. More often than not, it will be this book. Before teachers adopt a book, they have the opportunity to examine all Pro/ENGINEER books that are available. This book is their hands down favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Widely Used for Pro/ENGINEER training
Review: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire Tutorial and MultiMedia CD is really two books in one. The text portion is tutorial in style and is designed to illustrate the features of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. The MultiMedia CD, that is included with the book, contains an audio/visual presentation of the tutorial exercises contained in the book. A good approach to this book is to first view the CD to get a feel for how the software looks, then work through the tutorial exercises.

This book contains eleven tutorial lessons as follows:

1. User Interface, View Controls and Model Structure
2. Creating a Simple Object: Datum Planes, Sketcher
3. Creating a Simple Object: Holes, Chamfer, Rounds, Model Trees, Dimensions, etc.
4. Revolved Protrusions, Mirror Copies, Rounds, and Chamfers
5. Modeling Utilities and the 3 R's
6. Datums and Sketcher Tools
7. Patterns and Copies
8. Engineering Drawings
9. Assembly Fundamentals
10. Assembly Operations
11. Sweeps and Blends

The Appendix contains information on interface customization.

This book is, without a doubt, the best selling Pro/ENGINEER book available. It is widely used throughout the United States and Canada by colleges and universities that want to introduce their students to Pro/ENGINEER. If a school close to you teaches Pro/ENGINEER, contact the professor in charge of the course and ask what textbook he is using. More often than not, it will be this book. Before teachers adopt a book, they have the opportunity to examine all Pro/ENGINEER books that are available. This book is their hands down favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Design Software Tutorial Book Trials & Tribulations
Review: Problems. Problems. Problems.

I've not long completed lesson 6 of 11 chapters of this book and I have to write I am not impressed.

Errors in this book are too numerous and far from acceptable especially when one considers the price paid.!

Lesson 6, a task which involves producing a disc clamp part for a project which is intended to culminate into a vice assembly was found to be totally impossible to produce based on the information given both pictorially and dimensionally.

Male and female cone locators have no dimension location. They just float about a common axis.

Pockets are not dimensionally defined by form or location. What happened to the radiuses and depth?

In the first pictorial view, there are two webbed or cut rounded like forms within a revolved concentric recess that conflict with an adjacent view depicting its opposite side.

In the initial view one wonders if they could be through cuts. Then when one looks at the proceeding view one wonders if they are in fact webs since no through cuts are shown.

However, my final interpretation has resulted in these being similar through cuts as a result of a half cylindrically revolved recess, intended to mate and secure to a shaft (incidentally, this lacked a centre line axis to define position and had to be assumed central, based on neighbouring features).

I believe a section view is needed here and perhaps a more consistent drawing form design intent. Ideally two pictorial views supported by 3rd angle elevation views to help reduce the dimensional clutter and convey the form more accurately and clearly. I had to call on judgement and design intuition to complete this to a credible standard.

This is shoddy and totally unacceptable, since this task is essential for completion of the final vice assembly task. Confidence is not inspired it is merely weakened. I now ask myself, "Are there going to be further omissions fudges and errors?"

There is no substitute for correctly presented and communicated drawings (as the author acknowledges to a degree somewhere in his text), ideally to BS308 standard or similarly recognised drawing standard (for example adhering to the use of a common datum/s for dimensions, which seems to be lacking here).

In terms of a complete training package, apart from needing huge reserves of patience and time, one cannot effectively get through this book without reference to its companion CD. Its use is essential (especially for partially assisting with navigating legacy Pro-Engineer menu features, which I still find somewhat irksome since there is no info on how to respond when one gets into an odd seemingly inescapable command 'wont cancel' kind of loop).

This aspect of the software is far from intuitive. It does not act or respond to user inputs in ways the unfamiliar would expect and needs explanation. The author seems to have hoped or assumed that either the reader has previous exposure to an earlier version/s of Pro-Engineer - which I don't - or that a suitable software upgrade at further expense to the reader should patch this instructional omission. Again this is not good enough!

Looking back, beware of chapter 3 exercise task 4. The 'Loop' Sketcher command was needed here to eliminate what was a by-product of a chamfer profile (your approach might be different to mine). The 'loop' command was not mentioned in this chapter nor do I recall in previous ones. Took way to long to find it and identify its use. Trial and error was called upon to achieve it.

Based on my progress to date, I believe most uninitiated users of Pro-Engineer reliant on this tutorial as their primary source of instruction would need at least 'three' months to complete it successfully, without additional guidance support either by means of another book/CD combo or a knowledgeable Pro-Engineer tutor to help clarify and fill in the gaps and I think that's quite optimistic.

I'm in search of another book!

Views and experiences expressed by a practicing design engineer.

Rating:
Summary: Just a badddddd book!
Review: The book is just bad. I agree with most of the other reviewers. The exercises are poor, the quality of the pictures is even worst and the book is too wordy and vague. I think Roger likes to hear himself talk in a roundabout manner. This is just a bad book!!!

Rating:
Summary: Just a badddddd book!
Review: The book is just bad. I agree with most of the other reviewers. The exercises are poor, the quality of the pictures is even worst and the book is too wordy and vague. I think Roger likes to hear himself talk in a roundabout manner. This is just a bad book!!!

Rating:
Summary: Poor quality
Review: The book is just bad. Most exercises have no dimensions on them so you are really estimating dimensions and remembering them as u go along developing the part. This is OK with simple parts but with complex parts it would be nice to have dimensions. With dimensions one can compare the the part with the pictorial provided in the book - that gives the user an idea whether he/she modelled the part right. Sometimes it is possible to do the wrong thing and still get something that looks similar but is wrong. Dimensions quantize the end result and the user can know for SURE if the work done was right. In CAD its either a 100% right or 100% wrong especially if the error is in a key feature that is going to be mated with another part.
Even the few exercises which have dimensions are confusing. Some dimensions are vague and the user can misunderstand a dimension and only after working halfway does one realise that the part does not work! This is due to poor dimensioning and even poorer graphic quality of the book.
All this would still be OK if the book did a good job in letting you know how to use Pro/E. It does not. Its too wordy, vague, explaining things in a roundabout manner. How about having 2 pages to explain a concept like mirroring. Something which should take no more than 1 paragraph. They should separate the how-to-do-it and what-it-means aspects of the software. Its ludicrous to expect someone to read 3-4 pages to get to know something simple like modifying feature dimensions or setting references.
Lastly I have had this book for 1 month and I use all books very carefully yet the spine is coming unglued. I will be happy if the book lasts the rest of the semester.