Mastering AutoCAD 2002 (With CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Could be worse
Review: This book is far from ideal. My background is computers, and I'm used to documentation being written to tell me what I need to know, quickly. This book is a set of tutorials--it is NOT a reference. When I need to know something specific this book is nearly useless. If you don't really know what you want to learn and want to be led through a series of exercises this book may be useful. However, if you're starting from zero, I recommend "AutoCAD 2002: No Experience Required" by David Frey, which is written much more clearly and will more quickly give you a taste of all (or most) elements of AutoCAD. Omura's book required spending too much time on things I didn't need to know to get to what I did want to know.

Another major complaint is that this book is loaded with typos and errors. Clearly it was not proofread. Numbers in examples don't add up (example: last paragraph on p. 221: two times twelve is NOT forty-eight), assumptions are made about all settings being in their default positions (not safe if you're using someone else's computer) and commands that have not yet been covered are referred to. In the chapter on AutoLISP both the first and the second example programs have typos in them and if you don't have a programming background you could tear your hair out trying to figure out what you're doing wrong. I started to keep a list of all the errors I found, but it seems there's one every couple of pages. (Incidentally, I didn't find a single typo in David Frey's book, and I went through the entire thing.)

Finally I should mention the CD-ROM. The first thing this CD-ROM did was crash the computer I was using. After rebooting--twice--it still crashed when trying to run the installation program. This was running a recent installation of Windows ME with over 500MB of RAM. I was able to copy the example files off the disc manually, but this whole package clearly meets a very low standard of quality assurance.

Fortunately I'm about at the point where I'm able to find what I need in the online documentation, and this book was not completely useless in teaching me enough to reach that point. However, I find it hard to imagine there isn't something far superior out there that I could have used instead. This book could be worse, but it's far from ideal.

Rating:
Summary: Could be worse
Review: This book is far from ideal. My background is computers, and I'm used to documentation being written to tell me what I need to know, quickly. This book is a set of tutorials--it is NOT a reference. When I need to know something specific this book is nearly useless. If you don't really know what you want to learn and want to be led through a series of exercises this book may be useful. However, if you're starting from zero, I recommend "AutoCAD 2002: No Experience Required" by David Frey, which is written much more clearly and will more quickly give you a taste of all (or most) elements of AutoCAD. Omura's book required spending too much time on things I didn't need to know to get to what I did want to know.

Another major complaint is that this book is loaded with typos and errors. Clearly it was not proofread. Numbers in examples don't add up (example: last paragraph on p. 221: two times twelve is NOT forty-eight), assumptions are made about all settings being in their default positions (not safe if you're using someone else's computer) and commands that have not yet been covered are referred to. In the chapter on AutoLISP both the first and the second example programs have typos in them and if you don't have a programming background you could tear your hair out trying to figure out what you're doing wrong. I started to keep a list of all the errors I found, but it seems there's one every couple of pages. (Incidentally, I didn't find a single typo in David Frey's book, and I went through the entire thing.)

Finally I should mention the CD-ROM. The first thing this CD-ROM did was crash the computer I was using. After rebooting--twice--it still crashed when trying to run the installation program. This was running a recent installation of Windows ME with over 500MB of RAM. I was able to copy the example files off the disc manually, but this whole package clearly meets a very low standard of quality assurance.

Fortunately I'm about at the point where I'm able to find what I need in the online documentation, and this book was not completely useless in teaching me enough to reach that point. However, I find it hard to imagine there isn't something far superior out there that I could have used instead. This book could be worse, but it's far from ideal.