Using AutoCAD 2004: Basics

Rating:
Summary: Thorough, but mediocre exercises
Review: 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.