Basic Technical Drawing

This book is very practical in the sense of drawing good practices, the authors barely touch all the automated solutions to drawing because their approach does not require them. If you really want to learn how to present professionally looking technical drawings, just follow this book. Regardless of the tools you use, the recommendations presented in the book are in the most general form and the exercises for the reader to do, really help to solve layout problems specially in very complicated drawings. Great Book!!!

This book is an excellent choice for someone wishing to learn the basics of technical drawing. The book was prepared for a high-school level audience, but it has superb explanations of drawing concepts. The book is divided into 25 chapters. Just some of the important topics covered are: dimensioning, line choices, views and representations of objects, partial views, and many other standard drawing conventions, just to name a few. Although this book does address both CAD and mechanical drawing techniques, its CAD coverage is (by necessity) very limited. My background is in chemistry, and I had taught myself AutoCAD, but until I bought this book, my drawings were poor by proper standards. After using this book every day for about two weeks, my drawing skills improved immensely, and I was able to produce high quality drawings in a very short time. If you are new to technical drawing and wish to learn proper conventions in an easy to follow format, then you will be very glad you bought this book. Additionally, if you are wishing to create your drawings with AutoCAD, then an excellent companion to this book is "Applying AutoCAD-A Step by Step Approach" by Terry Wohlers. A word of advice: learn proper drawing techniques before trying to learn CAD.