Mastering AutoCAD 2006 and AutoCAD LT 2006 [With CDROM]

I had a need to learn to get around in AutoCAD. I am office manager in a machine shop. I eventually found that knowing my way around AutoCAD would be helpful to me and to the people I work for. I tried several books and was not satisfied. Then I found this one. The lessons and explanations are great. The author does not stick just to architectual drawings as many books do. There is extensive emphasis on drawing of individual parts, just what I needed. It also does a great job on 3-D drawing. This is the way the industry does it now. They usually begin with a fully 3-D (solid) drawing and derive the 2-D work from that. This book will show you how. It also comes with a CD that provides you with sample drawings that go along with the text. Look for the version that best matches the release of AutoCAD you are using.

For someone that just used 3D modeling programs, this bok helped a lot for figuring out how AutoCAD work. I would definitely recommend to anyone who is learning AutoCAD.

Good tutorial for first timers. Pace is quick enough. Great laymen explainations. Tutorial CD requires quick a bit of power from computer terminal, unable to use as of yet. Hinders lessons. Still recommend book, much better than what else is available.

I found the book to describe a lot of the Acad funtions, but not enough detail in the functions I was looking for.

I bought the Mastering AutoCAD 2000 edition of this book few years ago and learned AutoCAD from scratch. This latest edition has continue to become a very good reference both for starter and intermediate user like me. Nevertheless there are few things that can be improved: 1. "Copying block within file and across files" topic should be added to Chapter 6. Windows user tend to use the "copy & paste" block more than the traditional block insertion. Confusion often arises among rookie when they try to copy a block of same name from one file to another. 2. The author has chosen to use centrimeter(cm) as the base unit for the metric measurement. Architectural plan in metric always based in either milimeter(mm) and meter(m). Chosing something in between, i.e. cm, may not be a wise choice as cm will result in awkward scale factor. I hope to see the future edition will use mm instead of cm as base unit. 3. The material in Appendix B, page 1039, needs to be updated. "AGP graphics card with 64MB memory" is almost extint by contemporary standard.