Engineering Design with SolidWorks 2007 & MultiMedia CD 2-volume set

This is a great starter book which has step by step instructions. Also this book came witha CD to show how to do the different excercises if you cannot figure from the book.

I've been using the Engineering Design with SolidWorks book by Planchard and Planchard in my classroom for the past three years. In my opinion, this is the finest SolidWorks book on the market today for students that are new to the software and would like to better understand and apply proper design techniques. I can't comprehend why some people are compelled to write an unconstructive review about a skillfully written book. This book is the only book on SolidWorks that covers in a project base format; Fundamentals of part modeling, Fundamentals of assembly modeling, Fundamentals of drawing, and the fundamentals of top-down assembly modeling along with numerous key features from the features toolbar: Extruded Boss/Base, Extruded Cut, Sweep, loft, Revolve Boss/Base, and more. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only book that also briefly covers the sheet metal toolbar and its features. It provides a great exposure to creating simple sheet metal models without purchasing a separate sheet metal book. A past reviewer stated that, the book omitted important imbedded information to set up the title block in a drawing. He may want to read Chapter 3, page 13: Sheet Format and Title block under the custom properties section. Engineering Design with SolidWorks 2007 is by far the most comprehensive SolidWorks book for beginners on the market today. This book makes my life a lot easier in the classroom. My students enjoy the layout, illustrations, step by step procedures and the enclosed multimedia CD.

The Planchards teach solid engineering principles as well as Solidworks design. This text book is a cut above the rest.

This is the second book that I purchased from these authors. This book does a great job in explaining and illustrating the procedure to learn SolidWorks in various areas. I spent many hours going over the SolidWorks online tutorials incorporated into the software, and I just did not find them too useful. The tutorials assumed that you know the information in some areas and provided few or no illustrations to assist in the description process. Example: No PropertyManager or ConfigurationManager illustrations. For the new user, the incorporated Multimedia CD in the book is great to view and learn about 2D Sketching and 3D features: Extruded Boss/Base, Extrude Cut, Loft, Chamfer, Revolved Boss/Base, Revolved Cut, Fillet, Rib, Shell, Pattern, Mirror, etc. The book does an excellent job in providing the most recent changes in the 2007 software interface and covers the new features like: FeatureXpert, MateXpert, DraftXpert, SketchXpert, Task Pane, SW Search, etc. It does an excellent job on describing and showing the Mate process and geometry relation process. It provides an insight on various assembly design approaches, bottom-up vs. top-down and a sheet metal section that I thought I would never use, but was wrong until yesterday.

This is the first SolidWorks book that I purchased based on the past reviews of their 2006 book and meeting one of the authors at SolidWorks World last year. The book is amazing! The layout is simple, and the detailed illustrations with the step-by step procedures is just what I needed to understand and learn SW quickly and proficiently. I do not have an engineering degree, or any formal CAD training in any Software product. I attended a retraining program and I needed to learn SW quickly. The company that hired me in December has a non-existing training budget, in other words, I was on my own. The book is divided into projects and brings you from start to finish on a model, assembly or drawing addressing features, basic engineering principles and standards. The book aids you in understand how to select the correct Sketch plane, Reference plane for Mates in an assembly, and the proper way to dimension a model. It provides detail information on creating design tables, real world multi-part assemblies, drawings with multi-sheets and views, and a very general overview of COSMOSXpress. The Multimedia CD in the book is great when you just want to sit back and view a procedure. I'm planning take a formal SW CAD class this summer at a local college. When I checked the class, I realized that the instructor is using the 2006 version of this book. This will make my life a lot easier.