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Originally Posted by miketwalker
However, the book we use in my college class, that I've also found very popular to purchase online is "Pro|ENGINEER WILDFIRE Tutorial and MultiMedia CD by Toogood/Zecher" It is a click-by-click book showing how to do things, which is nice if you are completly new to the program... but it's not a good book for just looking for a quick fix if you broke something.
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Roger Toogood's tutorials for Pro/E 2001 are good as well. You also might find stuff at
Pro/E Central (free registration likely useful) [
Edit: Pro/E central has had a bit of a renovation this week, it seems. Check into it, even if you're not working in Pro/E--they seem to have diversified.],
Synthesis Engineering (tips and tricks),
Olaf Corten's Pro/E Site (hundreds of links here, many are good!) and the
Pro/E FAQ-O-Matic (FAQ, no specific Pro/E Student Edition reference, though).
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Originally Posted by miketwalker
Pro/E does have many nifty little features, but it is so incredibly non-user-friendly that when you make a minor mistake it can set you back an hour. It's ridiculous. With Inventor and Solid Edge you can simply go back to fix things, whereas Pro/E is very fidgity sometimes.
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Originally Posted by miketwalker
Pro/E's user interface is very strange.
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Very, very true. Wildfire improves on this, incredibly enough, and with some practice, you'll find yourself screwing up less and less. But he's right about the fantastically steep price for not planning your model (sketches, especially). On the other hand, A Pro/E model tends to be more geometrically consistent and correct than an Inventor one--Inventor allows more assumptions in its constraints, and doesn't do a good (some would say Pro/E is infuriatingly pedantic) job of checking inter-file consistency.
Do you need Pro/E for FIRST? Maybe not. Do I like it? Yes, I do, because I've managed to use it for FIRST, for class assignments, and for other interesting projects--and perhaps most importantly (in the "grand scheme of things") at work. Let's face it: Inventor is laughed at in the serious 3D modelling community, because it's too new, and Autodesk really blew it with AutoCAD's 3D functions. It's not that it's bad, just that it's
less capable, and carries an unfair amount of AutoCAD's baggage (totally undeserved, since the 3D modelling philosophies of AutoCAD and Inventor are utterly different).
I can't say for sure whether Inventor will be 10 times easier to learn than Pro/E, but I suspect it isn't that bad. Maybe 4 times easier. The trouble is, it can't do half the stuff Pro/E can. If you just want solid modelling, and have a substantially limited amount of time in which to learn it, Inventor is the way; if you have the time to mess around, and want far more advanced capabilities, or want to pursue a related career, learn Pro/E.
Also, I assume that you would be getting Student or Academic editions (those are not the same thing) of Pro/E--that negates much of the cost disadvantage (commercial versions of Pro/E are disgustingly expensive--tens of thousands of dollars, per seat!).