Autodesk Inventor 2015 Tutorial

As an instructor in utilization's of Inventor 2015... reviewing this E-Book for my students... IT is very good start in the basics of utilization...

Avoid, and good luck. I watched Autodesks Inventor tutorials on youtube and got a far better understanding of what I was doing and why than this disaster of an Ebook. The formatting is horrible in Kindle Reader. The tutorials skip around and segway into confusing examples of what things are doing. I made it to Chapter 3 and gave up. I KNOW more watching the youtube videos than I do with this book. This book has to have been self published.

Having written a lot of procedure documents for novices in a field, i expected some issues with a book where I was the novice. This book has more than it share of them. The first tutorial went very well, with only a few errors on my part because I did not understand the significance of a few words. The next tutorial was a disaster! The screen-shot does not match the software and even searching the help files has not gotten me past the place where I am stuck. I also has hoped that there would be a website to get clarification of find finished tutorial files for comparison, but no such luck. I'm about to order a different tutorial as well as continue Inventor's own internal training and you tube videos.

By way of background, I am a student whose past experience of CAD extends to Sketchup; in other words it's pretty much non-existant. Despite this I have learnt other industry specific software packages such as ArcGIS and consider myself capable of learning most software packages, even niche ones.The main positive of the book is that it gets pretty much straight to business; chapter 1 provides an incredibly brief overview of what Inventor is and what it is for, as well as key terms and views (e.g. the browser window, the ribbon). Chapter 2 has tutorials for building basic parts and away you go. The book covers part design, assembly, drawings and animation, and sheet metal design. I like that it doesn't muck about, and that there is good variety in the nature of the parts you design to show off the software's functionality; however, it falls down in numerous areas.Firstly, you don't get a very good feel of why you are doing what you are doing - it is assumed that you can generalise an action and know when to use it. Further, it doesn't explore all the options for each function you use; it is very much do this then do that. Another big issue (which may be a Kindle problem more than anything else, this is my first Kindle book) is that the images are small and cannot be enlarged or zoomed into - I have had frequent problems trying to ascertain dimensions in images. My pet peeve is that the book assumes a lot of you; it isn't long before you are left to work out how to arrive at a sketch - and later on in a tutorial if you've got it wrong the whole thing becomes a mess. I've also had frequent problems when following the step-by-step guide with performing complex operations only to be told something isn't right - and it becomes impossible to correct, or work out where you've gone wrong.I've stopped at tutorial 2 in chapter 7 for the slider crank. It has advised me that I need to download files from the companion website - but where is the link to this?I feel it has given me a decent introduction to Inventor, but I need another more detailed book before I can rely on YouTube videos and the Autodesk forums to provide ad hoc guides to more specific design tasks.

All good