Product Description
Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 is one of the most widely used CAD/CAM software programs in the world today. Designed for a one or two semester undergraduate course for first or second year engineering students, Pro/engineer Wildfire 3.0 is an extremely beneficial book for both aspiring and newly employed engineers. The text involves creating a new part, an assembly, or drawing, using a set of Pro/E commands, walking you through the process systematically and guiding you through parametric design. While using this text, a student will create individual parts, assemblies, and drawings.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 2 reviews)

A very good job with a problematic subject.

After reading the previous review, shown to me by one of my colleague, I had to respond. I have had the pleasure / displeasure of using over a dozen types of various CAD books in a variety of dominant CAD software packages to help train folks for industry and this book has been one of them. Most of these books are okay at best and having helped edit some of them it is a daunting task. Mr. Lamit's WF3 book does a reasonable good job at hitting this moving target. But it is less then useless to hate or like any CAD package. It is merely a tool management has choose to run their operations and unfortunately most of them do not have a clue as to the mass ramifications of the various ins and outs of the systems they have chosen. Most of these tools are problematic at best but do continue to evolve and get better over time. I personally prefer parametric systems but if the man writing the checks tells me to use a non-parametric system to do my job then so be it.

If however one was to work in a company that has the requirement of working with 100,000 plus part assemblies and they decide to go with a parametric system then for the most part only UG or Pro/E can actually handle that type of need. Most companies do not need this type of power and may choose to use SolidWorks, Inventor or SolidEdge to run their design operations. SolidWorks is a fine tool, that I quite like, but it too has some issues.

But I digress... The consistency and accuracy that Mr. Lamit maintains throughout all of his Pro/E books, going all the way back to Pro/E 18, has been of great assistance to teaching newcomers as well as folks needing to upgrade their skills to the newest revision in all of my classes over the years. With the supplementary documentation provided for free on his cad-resources.com page, it is truly a great bargain for anyone wishing to delve into the complex world of Pro/E. Many of my students comment about how much more concise his books are compared to other CAD books that they have used. Each lesson builds nicely from one chapter to the next and covers a vast amount of territory for a book of this size. Others don't even come close and I can only hope that he will continue to write these fine books for many years to come, otherwise I am sure I will have great difficulty in finding any comparable book that conveying the appropriate techniques for parametric modeling.

April 03, 2008

Average-Quality Text

While I will attempt to hide my prejudice against Pro/E and limit my review to Mr. Lamit's book, I cannot help but notice a general austerity in the Pro/E community. There appears to be an almost nostalgic reverence for the old command-line version of Pro/Engineer, and that sentiment shows itself in Wildfire's user interface which simply masks the command line with buttons rather giving the software a true makeover.

The book itself is good for providing hands-on tutorials, but I cannot call it a self-contained reference. The descriptions can become verbose, and the author often lacks eloquence in describing the topic at hand. While some may appreciate such a just-the-facts approach, I feel some theoretical background would be helpful in understanding how the software works. Historical background would also be nice. Furthermore, the tutorials lack a good organizational structure; instead of a bulleted list of operations or sequences, the book proceeds haphazardly with bold lettering and arrows until the end of a lesson. In fairness, there are plenty of screen shots compensate for the lack of written organization.

Occasionally, the procedures outlined in the book are missing steps or do not produce the desired end result; here, the user is left to fill in the gaps. Without a mentor or dedicated technical support, I'm afraid many an aspiring design engineer would find themselves lost or frustrated with this text.

I really wanted to tell future readers to not buy this book, but that would be insincere. It is, after all, a good attempt at teaching an arduously difficult and unfriendly piece of software to the masses. For those who have not invested themselves in a company that uses Pro/E, my advice would be to steer clear of Pro/E altogether and pick up a book on SolidWorks or SolidEdge. Aside from C2-tangent fillets and advanced surfacing, I am convinced that Pro/E does not hold any advantage over the other two.
February 19, 2008

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 Tutorial and MultiMedia CD
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Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Tutorial Wildfire 3.0
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Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 Tutorial
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by James Gee

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 for Designers
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Mechanism Design with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0
by Kuang-Hua Chang