Bible Backstory

Some rumors have gotten back to me that there are some people out there who think that the credit (or blame) for the SolidWorks 2007 Bible should be shared, and that I am not responsible for all of the content. Let me put these rumors to rest. I am the only author associated with this book. I believe the issue stems from the fact that the Barnes and Noble website as well as several other smaller book seller sites are co-crediting both me and Paul Tran for the book. There are some sites that only credit Paul Tran. Paul is not responsible for any of this book. Also, SolidWorks Corp did not commission or contract me to write this book, which should become evident by the time you read the first couple of chapters. Here’s the story:

Paul Tran, several years ago, had a couple of pieces of SolidWorks related writing published. These were called SolidWorks Quick Guide, and Teach Yourself SolidWorks. I believe these were active in the 2001 – 2003 time frame. I thought, but cannot confirm, that Paul also had possibly self-published something a bit larger than a pamphlet a few years earlier, say in the late 90’s. Anyway, just to say that Paul Tran had a history of writing stuff for SW users, and was involved in training somehow, possibly as a reseller employee. I can’t find too much info on Paul, but here is an interview I think is with the guy in question.

In May of 2006, an editor from the publisher JWiley contacted me to see if I was interested in writing a book whose title was already chiseled in stone so to speak, the SolidWorks 2007 Bible. They had an author lined up, namely Mr. Tran, but for various reasons he had backed out before starting. By the time Wiley had conceived the project and set out a time line, they started to notify some of the larger book sellers of the details about the book, which at this time was still credited to Paul.

I was obviously very excited about the project, but truthfully, it came at a really bad time. The publisher’s time line for publication could be described as nothing short of fiction. 1000 pages in 3 months? No way. I had just committed to a 2.5 week stint in Boston for a design project, and was working on some training manuals for SolidWorks Corp, the 2007 Advanced Part Modeling, the brand new Advanced Surface Modeling and the also new Mold Techniques training manuals.

These training manuals were in a bit of a new direction for SolidWorks, but I was charged with copying the style of the existing books. I thought that the new books should give out more rather than less information, and avoid the habit some of the other manuals have of “dumbing down” the material so that the material was easily digestible, not necessarily to convey the maximum amount of information to the student. This had the result of limiting the brighter students to accommodate the mediocre. I recognized, though, that this was not the place to get involved in a philosophical debate. I was being contracted to develop materials for the corporate manuals, and I wanted to do a good job. In the end, I think that they were less than satisfied with what I provided, which I honestly regret, since this is work I liked and wanted to do more of.

In any case, the experience with the training manuals gave me direction for the Bible. The training manuals had to be written so that the average reseller application engineer could deliver it. It also had to fit into an established time frame, and had to be sunnily optimistic. There is also a significant political aspect to the training materials… Although I loved doing the work, and was very interested in the project, maybe it was just not meant to be. If you know much about me, you know that I am often painfully honest about the capabilities of the software, and incapable of playing the politics games. None of this could have an outlet in the training materials, and was pent up ready to be unleashed in the SW Bible.

So the Bible was written from a fiercely independent point of view. I was brutally honest when writing about topics where SolidWorks has struggled, but also glowed with praise around topics in which SolidWorks is far stronger than expected. Toolbox and interface / naming inconsistencies were areas I tended to criticize, but tools like fillets and the Fill surface were viewed very positively. This book is not your average sales pitch. It is both the lament and the applause of a real user. Many times in the course of the book, I suggest that the reader should submit enhancement requests on particular functionality to let SolidWorks know people pay attention to things like menus and toolbars with different names or multiple functions with the same names, or whatever bee was in my bonnet at the moment.

Beyond that, I decided that I had enough of talking down to SolidWorks users. When you talk to Pro/Engineer users, they seem to know so much more about their software than SolidWorks users. Catia and Unigraphics users know far more about the “guts” of CAD and math-based modeling, and SolidWorks users seemed like oblivious sheep in comparison. This is not because SW users are stupid, but because precious little real information escapes from the source, and the official documentation from SolidWorks habitually avoided telling you “why” things work or don’t work. The SW Bible talks about “why”. Some of Ed Eaton’s explanations about how things in SolidWorks worked seemed to catch on like crazy because SW users were starved for this kind of info, which was part of the basic education with the other modeling packages. Anyway, I’ve hashed through most of this “dumbing down of CAD” idea in other posts. I was not going to be party to this “dumbing down” or talking down to SW users. I was going to talk about “why”.

There were times when the rant went a bit far to put into print, which was why I selected as my technical editor Richard Doyle, a friend who could temper my diatribe with a cooler tone. Several parts of the text were toned down due to his calming influence.

But then there were other Wiley editors. I thought being the author of a book meant I  could say what I wanted to, free from the SolidWorks corporate politics. In reality I had only traded one tyrant for another. One of the Wiley editors was brutal. If there was anyone who could claim co-authorship, it would be this one editor. There were times when my grammar or consistency were less than perfect, I’m an engineer, after all, not an English major, but this editor didn’t understand the difference between bad grammar and the quirky use of certain technical terms or what I called “SolidWorks vernacular” – things like the use of the term RMB, “tree” instead of FeatureManager, or any one of a number of other bits of terminology we have come to accept as part of the SolidWorks lexicon. Anyway, most of the tone survived, albeit in a muffled, strangled, suffocated sort of way.

So, the short version of the story is that:

–  Paul Tran does not share the blame for the SolidWorks 2007 Bible

–  I did not write this book for SolidWorks Corporation

–  SolidWorks Corp did not help directly with the writing of the book

–  If something sounds confused and awkward in the book, I have the email address for an editor you can send complaints to

Finally, the name of the book. It sounds entirely pretentious and grandiose. It was not my choice. It is the name of the series of books published by Wiley for other things like MS Office, HTML programming, 3DSmax, and so on. There are several overtones of the word “Bible” that I’m uncomfortable with. First, I do not draw any parallels between myself and Moses, or between what I have written and the 10 Commandments. It is not meant to offend Muslims, Latter Day Saints, Jews, Hindus, Taoists, Confucianists, Buddhists or anyone else who uses other sacred texts. The name was meant by the publisher to convey encyclopedic inclusiveness, which is another thing that I cannot claim I have achieved. As soon as I had declared it “finished”, people were asking for many things that I simply had not included such as FEA, Routing, Complex Shapes, PDMWorks, Conisio, etc, etc. All I can say is “sorry”. 1100 pages was enough, and I had to limit it to just the basic SolidWorks functionality to squeeze it in. You may find a few small topics which have been omitted. Things like the Mold Tools. Send me an email if you catch something that should be there.