Recently we had a mini Inventor session for our team. The book we used was Autodesk Inventor 8 Essentials. here is a link on amazon to it
link
i dont agree with the "customer review" ive never had the program that comes with it crash.
I know it helped me to understand the differnt aspects of inventor. some of the first exercises with constraints have you rezise and reshape some very odd sketches. It also gives you drawings to make parts off of. So you actually learn what was just said in the last chapter. I didnt actually read the book, i just used the cd becasue we only had two copies of the book. So i can only tell you what was good about the cd. hope this helps