Autodesk Inventor From The Top

Rating:
Summary: Bad Title - Good Book- Title should be From the Beginning
Review: I have completed beginning and advanced Inventor classes using this book. I have held an A average with very little confusion of how to use the knowledge from this book. It covers all the most necessary topics, detailed enough for me and all of my classmates to master.

Rating:
Summary: Autodesk Inventor from the Top
Review: I have worked my way through about 75 percent of this book. I find it to be very helpful for learning to use Inventor from scratch. I was having no luck at all with the tutorial that came on the software CD. This book has taken me to the intermediate level.

I wish there were fewer typos. I wish there were fewer instances of pick sequences being out of order, (work plane referenced to a surface and an axis). I wish the index did not expect the reader to know the Autodesk vernacular. All the above make using the book dificult, but they do not make it useless. I am able to use the software now as a result of studying this book.

It is not a reference, it is a tutorial, and should be studied in sequence. Each chapter expects the student to know and be able to use the information in the previous chapters.

Rating:
Summary: Autodesk Inventor from the Top
Review: I have worked my way through about 75 percent of this book. I find it to be very helpful for learning to use Inventor from scratch. I was having no luck at all with the tutorial that came on the software CD. This book has taken me to the intermediate level.

I wish there were fewer typos. I wish there were fewer instances of pick sequences being out of order, (work plane referenced to a surface and an axis). I wish the index did not expect the reader to know the Autodesk vernacular. All the above make using the book dificult, but they do not make it useless. I am able to use the software now as a result of studying this book.

It is not a reference, it is a tutorial, and should be studied in sequence. Each chapter expects the student to know and be able to use the information in the previous chapters.

Rating:
Summary: Not just disappointing, but totally disappointing
Review: I regret wasting money on this book. It is even worst than the online help menu

Rating:
Summary: Autodesk Inventor From The Top
Review: In my 10+ years as a Certified Autodesk Instructor, I have found that there are two approaches to writing a tutorial manual. First, there's the "just shut up and do it" approach, where you follow instructions, but a lack of reference information to explain what you just did causes you to wonder "O.K., I did it, but what did I do?". Then there's the "Russian novel" approach, where the theory is that if you read a three inch thick book about how to play a Mozart piano concerto, that you will be able to sit down at a piano and play a Mozart piano concerto. To master piano, the golf swing, or a complex software program, you have to use it, not read about it.

"Autodesk Inventor From The Top" strikes an excellent blend of reference information with hands-on practice to provide the reader with a thorough grasp of this powerful design tool. The authors provide an "every item of every menu and dialog box" explanation of the guts of the program. They cover many key topics that are missing from the "official" Autodesk Essentials Courseware, most notably a jaw-droppingly powerful feature called Iparts. In fact, it's surprising how much information they crammed into a book of less than 400 pages. The tutorial exercises are, for the most part, accurate and clearly presented. Particularly useful are the practice exercises at the end of each chapter, which challenge you to use the skills learned in the chapter without detailed instructions. This is where you really learn the program (you have to think!).

A few minor boo-boo's pop up occasionally. For instance, the explanation of the "Defer Update" setting in the Assemblies chapter says the opposite of what it should, the "Shaft" drawing in Tutorial 4.2 is missing from the book's CD, and the drawing for Tutorial 6.4 is already completed (the CD problems may have already been cleared up at the publisher). Also, on a grammatical note, (and I'm nit-picking here) the writing has a lot of passive voice, which tends to detract from the precision and efficiency of the instruction. But these problems are minor compared to the grasp that you will gain of a very powerful and feature-packed design tool from a relatively small investment of time and money.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The title of the book is misleading and the book is disappointing. It it the other way round. If you want to find out the tricks of using Inventor or to discover the "tops" of Inventor, don't buy this book. It is simply of replica of the help menu found from the application