Pro Engineer -Wildfire Instructor (Mcgraw-Hill Graphics Series) by David S Kelley

Product Description

Pro/Engineer Wildfire Instructor introduces the reader to this powerful CAD package. This text is organized around step by step tutorials--the most effective way to teach and learn this procedure-intensive CAD application. Pro/Engineer Wildfire Instructor provides a solid background in parametric design and constraint-based modeling. In addition, the comprehensive references make this text an all-in-one tutorial, reference and lecture guide for students of Pro/Engineer.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #2607041 in Books
Published on: 2004-01-02
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
576 pages
Customer Reviews

Inaccuracies w/r to Wildfire Release 2.0
The book explains the mechanics of how to perform basic operations with Wildfire very well, in the first half of the book. However, more complex or higher level operations are sometimes inaccurate, having incorrect or missing steps, or poorly explained in later chapters. This includes some of what the book refers to as advanced drawing and modeling tools. It is quite frustrating to follow the directions given in the text only to find the software does not perform the task as described. In addition, the text gives no clue how to recover from mistakes. Thus, the user is often forced to closeout of the model/drawing completely and start from scratch, or the last save, assuming the application has not locked-up the computer. There is no coverage of sheetmetal modeling techniques, either.
It would appear the author either wrote the book based on an earlier release of Wildfire, or based it on Pro-E 2001. In any case, the GUI's in some cases do not look the same as shown in the text and the selectable choices are not always as described in the book.
Finally, Kelley/McGraw-Hill provide downloadable models and drawings that are useful at the noted website. However, there is no errata, or update posted for the book and no contact for Kelley.
Bottomline: Assuming better alternatives exist, it is a questionable purchase for novices wanting to learn Wildfire 2.0 or later.

This book makes baby jesus cry
This book is the biggest load of donkey excrement I have ever had the displeasure to lay my eyes on. I am a computer scientist, so I'm used to reading some pretty crappy documentation, but the only thing less informative and useful than this book was the help file that comes with the application.

The only use I can think of for this book is hurling it at the author in a really violent way.