This week’s selection is “400 CAD Exercises” by Sachidanand Jha.
This is a most unusual book, and one that could help raise your CAD skills to higher levels, regardless of which specific CAD tool you’re using.
Typically increasing skills through a book is a tutorial process: the author will show steps required to do a particular activity. That’s not what happens in this book at all.
Instead, it’s a series of CAD drawings and exercises, four hundred in total. Here’s a typical page from the book:
The idea is to use whichever CAD tool you’re trained with to attempt duplicating the drawings and exercises. No instructions or tutorial-style narrative is provided.
You’re on your own.
This is often one of the best ways to learn CAD tools. My approach is to learn a new trick at the time I need to when designing a new 3D model. After a long period of this, one can gradually build up considerable capabilities in a CAD tool.
But with this book it’s like that process, but on steroids: You can flip it open to a page and see if you are able to build that design. If not, you’ll soon figure out how.
The most beautiful part of this book is that it is entirely agnostic as to which CAD tool to use: it’s just diagrams of designs, and those can be produced in any competent CAD system. However, the precise manner to do so will vary between tools. But that doesn’t matter because you’ll be using your own choice of tool.
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Via Amazon
