As kickoff grows close, and persons desire to model things in Inventor, new users will invariably be attempting to teach themselves. I have always found the book that accompanies the kit and the incorperated tutorials incomplete and lacking. However, after taking a course in Inventor at university, I highly recommend ‘Mastering Autodesk Inventor’ by Chin-Sheng Chen and Hui Zhang (isbn no. 1590221028). I’m not affiliated in any way with those trying to sell the book, just thought it was a nifty resource for people to have, and at $30, it’s not too bad for price, either.
It seemed like in every single one of my CAD classes I have taken thus far in college, that we were the last stage of checking in the publication of the book.
There were so many errors in the books, it’s not funny.
“Click control z to zoom out” when it’s really “shift z”… Things along that line.
Have you actually gone through the book and followed exactly what it told you to do? How is the accuracy?
Also, does the book actually have an index in case you want to look something up quickly? Most CAD books, if any, didn’t have an index which made troubleshooting a real pain.
I guess they figure if it’s a book for a software, that you have the software in front of you at all times, and you can use the Help menu as a scapegoat.
I came into the course with knowledge of inventor (thank you, FIRST), an everything checked out OK. Also, I found it helpful that it incudes not only “how to do X”, but also tutorials that have you build nifty things. It also covers animation, something the accompanying book and the built in tutorials are not exactly helpful with. No real index though, even if the table of contents is descriptive. Out of all the things I’ve tried to use to learn Inventor, however, this is by far the best.
I’ve found that between reading the tutorials included with Inventor and some serious clicking around in the interface, it doesn’t take much to teach Inventor to yourself. I have also found that teaching somethign to yourself helps one remember it better than reading it out of a to-do guide. That’s just what worked for me and maybe it will work for some newbies this time around.
You might “remember it better” but what is it that you are remembering??
Just a word of caution from a voice of experience … When you are learning by trial and error you learn whatever you stumble upon that works, which might end up being a very difficult way to do something that is really quite simple, not to mention how it could affect your downstream designing/modeling. There is a ton of utility and automation built in to these programs which you are likely to miss if you have no resource (teacher or book/lesson) to identify it for you.
That was why I read the tutorials as well. If you read the tutorials, the new features guide, and the index and such, then you shoudl be able to cover most of what you need to know. Other than that, you should have some kind of mentor to look over your drawings to make sure you are doing it correctly.
Thanks for the ISBN on that book, looks very useful. I’m heading CAD on my team this year, and I was wondering, do we need to be using version 7 of Inventor to submit CAD files to FIRST?
If you do need to submit them to FIRST (do you?) you’ll probly use Inventor 8, if that’s what they’re giving us this year. The difference between the editions is most likely negligable.
If you are using version x and FIRST is usign version 8, Inventor will import the files from the earlier verion x to version 8 (the version they gave us this year). (I presume you mean for the Autodesk award). Anyway, you might as well install 8 in case you decide to look at other peoples’ files (if they used a later version than you are using). Inventor can import from earlier versions, but not later ones.