New Book – Mastering SolidWorks

I finally heard from my publisher. The new book will be called Mastering SolidWorks (the old books were called SolidWorks Bible), will have this engine on the cover, and will be available from Amazon and other resellers on November 20, although it sounds like there may be some places you can get it by November 5. I’ll come back and share the exact cover when I get it. You can preorder it now from Amazon if you want to be one of the first to get hold of it.

I do wish I had been able to spend unlimited time on this project. I enjoy researching, experimenting, and talking with users about the functionality in this software. My part of the work was only part of this. Alin Vargatu, as you might know already, was my technical editor, and has been a huge part of the success this book will have. And then of course, things at my publisher have changed, and I’ve had to go through up to 4 sets of edits. So my own changes/rewrites, Alin’s and then 2-3 other editors. So I’ve been through these 1200 +/- pages 4 times. We’re still not quite done.

This has been the longest it has ever taken me to get a book together. From start to finish, this will have taken over a year. Every screen shot and every icon had to be recaptured because of the changes in the interface in the last 5 releases. We toyed with adding a new chapter on MBD – Model Based Design, but I determined that there were too few existing customers and the functionality was possibly still too much in question. I made some new models for this version, expanded some old ones, and each chapter has a new set of short exercises at the end in addition to the step-by-step instructions for some tutorials and the video introductions for each chapter (39 chapters). So yes, this was a monumental amount of work.

I do want to take some extra space to thank Alin Vargatu on his patience with me on this. Alin was key to bringing me up to speed on several of the new tools. A lot of new material has been added (and old material removed) at Alin’s suggestion. In many cases in the book I make certain claims that I had to re-test to verify that these were still the case in the new version. I guess it’s bad news that several old bugs are still there, and are still documented in the book, but there were also several new little pieces of functionality that have solved little gripes that I used to have. In some cases, very nice additions to the software, in some cases mind-bogglingly incomplete half attempts at something cool.

The company and the software have changed drastically since the last time I went through this exercise. SolidWorks did give me a “partner” license to write the book, which I appreciate. I refrained from calling them directly for tech support, mostly out of impatience with their annoyance, if that makes any sense. I didn’t cave in to the marketing machine’s SOLIDWORKS attention-drawing (and PRO/E-like) capitalization, and stuck with the traditional SolidWorks. Also, I haven’t been as critical of the company or the software on the SolidWorks forum or on this blog as I was last time around. While the software still attracts a fan base, there is just something different about the intensity level this many years after it seems like they have hit their peak.

In some ways, it was astonishingly easy to come back 5 releases later and still write a significant update. That was mostly due to there being relatively few big structural changes. I didn’t cover the new renderer, any of the V6 based tools, the PDM, any plastics or electrical tools or even the ScanTo3D changes. I just covered the base software. To me the best new additions have been the small things, like the Flat Tree Display, the Dynamic Reference Visualization, and some of the tools for hide/show bodies, some of the new filleting tools, initial sketch scaling, enter to repeat, , ESC in dimensions, the breadcrumb display, selection methods, copy with mates, virtual parts renaming, replace components, getting the focus right in value entry boxes, sweep with circular profile, through all-both, lots of little things that really needed to be done, and change the overall workflow for every day tasks.

I know it’s still early, and as impatient as I’ve been getting this news from my publisher, I’m sure some of you will be waiting by the mailbox for this to show up. It’s still a great book for getting that next level type of information. It is possibly not the book for the generation of people who need constant hand-holding to do even the simplest tasks, but for those who will be unleashed by knowledge, there is a lot of personal experience with real world design, and a lot of theoretical experimentation that has gone into this book. Sometimes we get into philosophy, sometimes a little meta-physical, and every now and then a little snark shines through. I’ll give you multiple ways to accomplish individual tasks, pros and cons about this method or that method, best practice lists and exceptions to the rules, there’s a lot of stuff in the book.

Sometimes people ask me about writing, and I’ve got this to say about that. Writing is easy. What’s difficult is dealing with editors. Regardless of who you are or what you write, you probably need someone else to look through your writing before its published (take this blog for example – I do my own editing, which is not the best way, but its what I have). On every book I’ve had different editors, and this time, my publisher (JWiley) has merged with another publisher, so all the rules have changed. This time I got a very mean spirited editor who was simply sarcastic at me most of the time. First of all, it’s not easy having someone criticizing your work, especially when several other editors have already been through it and changed the things that are being criticized. Second, I’m not a real writer, as I’ve established in previous posts, and these editors are used to dealing with writers.  They assume I know what I’m doing, which is clearly wrong. I had to deal with a technical editor (Alin) who offered perspective on the actual content, a content editor who just randomly criticizes stuff out of shear meanness, a compositor who arranges images and other stuff, a standards person who edits according to publisher standards, and a grammar editor, who is working overtime right now. All of this is done through FTP and email. Publishers are the last ones to move to the next century. They still worship Gutenberg, I think. Only two of these editors have been very helpful – Alin, and whoever this last one is, because they are pointing out sentences that actually don’t make sense that have somehow slipped through an army of previous editors.

If you want to write a book and think you’re too modern to use an editor, I guarantee you’re fooling yourself.

And then the issue of video tutorials. In this book I’ve included an introductory video for each chapter. These are not video tutorials. I know there are some people today who can’t do something if it can’t be found on YouTube. These people are on the forum, and sound like they’re demanding step-by-step video tutorials as if someone owes them something. I find that a little annoying. It’s like they aren’t willing to adventure into the unknown. They have to know it before they will try it. I have a feeling the real world hits these people hard. Sever the link to YouTube and they just can’t function.

Video is a great way to show a certain focused piece of information, but as soon as you try to get more general with it, or branch out with options, it becomes very inefficient. I wrote some video tutorials 6 years ago, and honestly, I got paid much more money for far less information (compared to the book). Like 1/8th of the information of text, its almost embarrassing. And the video costs a lot more. I was amazed by this. When you’re done watching the video you can model a duck. But not much else. I see the value of video, and my goal is still to make some sort of mixed media document that combines text, still images and video. Just haven’t found the right project yet.

We still have a couple months to wait for the actual book, but I feel like it’s almost done. Thanks for waiting, and thanks for answering my odd questions on the forum, and thanks for buying a copy of Mastering SolidWorks!