Selective History of SolidWorks Books

I’ve been lucky to meet several SolidWorks book authors. It wasn’t an intentional thing, just accidental.I don’t claim to know all the books or all the authors, but I have met several. Looking back, this must have had some sort of effect on getting me into the business. The idea that you could write something and touch the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of other people held some fascination for me.

The first SolidWorks book I remember was Greg Jankowski’s  SolidWorks for AutoCAD Users. The first time I ever met Greg was in Palm Springs at the reseller event before the first SolidWorks World event. We were at the airport. This was 1997 or 1998. I didn’t get to know Greg or his book very well, but I did remember being impressed that I had met an actual author. Greg was the one who started the SolidWorks USENET page, comp.cad.solidworks. This was the true wild wild west of the internet. It’s funny how we swung from that roughness to today’s easily offended social media scene so quickly. The early SolidWorks forum on the www pretty much sealed the fate of the old USENET page, which was completely unregulated, full of trolls, and eventually devolved into just spammers and advertisements. Greg went on to work in user advocacy at SolidWorks.

Greg also authored the SolidWorks for Dummies book years later (2006). The publisher of the Dummies books, JWiley, has a pretty structured way of putting these books together. They are generally short, to the point, and meant to get you rolling as quickly as possible. Because Greg started working at SolidWorks at about 2001 and this book was published in 2006, SolidWorks for Dummies has a different flavor than some of the other books. To me, it had a bit of the flavor of an advertisement rather than a straight informative or instructive book.

I didn’t realize at the time, just noticing now, that David Murray was listed as co-author on the first Jankowski book. Dave, it turned out, worked at a competing reseller in Syracuse doing tech support and training (I was in Rochester). He went on to write the Inside SolidWorks book. The fellow I worked for had some, er, ethical challenges, and he would try to diminish Dave’s role, calling him a ghost writer, and other things. I got to meet Dave eventually, and worked at the same organization for a while. What I got from that was that not all writers were the same. Greg was very outgoing, and Dave seemed more introverted, and frankly, not very valued by the people he worked for. I spent more time with Dave’s book, and I could start to see that these books were written by real mortal beings. I had more experience with the software, with tech support, with training, and in general more experience with customer needs by this point, so I could relate to Dave’s examples.

From there, the next SolidWorks author I met was Marie Planchard. My first meeting with her was over email, and eventually over the phone. Or maybe it was at a user group meeting up in Massachusetts, not sure. Marie contacted me to get me to read over a chapter of the book on plastics. This was really my first look at the pre-publishing side of the book writing world.

Marie was a professor at a local college, and brought an educator’s slant to SolidWorks books. Previously books had been written aimed at professional end users, but Marie worked with students. Marie co-wrote the books with her husband, but she seemed like the more outgoing of the two. They have written a huge series of books encompassing many relevant SolidWorks topics. Marie went on to work for SolidWorks, and her husband has taken over the book writing.

My own initiation into SolidWorks book writing came one afternoon. I was working dilligently on several design consulting jobs, doing a lot with SolidWorks user groups, public speaking, software implementation consulting, and keeping up my own website. Then out of the blue one day, an “acquisition editor” from JWiley called me and asked if I’d like to write a book. Other than the fact that I was always spewing written word on comp.cad.solidworks, my own site, and various CAD related forums, I had no experience writing books.

I immediately accepted the offer, and started cleaning up loose ends. The first book was just shy of 1000 pages, and took 4 months to complete. I worked 16 hours a day 6 days a week, and learned to type like a fiend. The SolidWorks 2007 Bible was born. Because I was a different kind of author, this was a different kind of book. I wasn’t a reseller or a SW employee. I was an end user. SolidWorks had given me triumph and defeat, so this was reflected in the book. Since I wasn’t even a real writer, the book became more conversational in style, and the demos were more “look over my shoulder as I do this” kind of thing. They’ve continued to evolve, including videos with each chapter, and a lot of sample data – all in all, each new edition of the book has grown to include over 8 Gb of material.

Print books are ok, and I know a lot of people have been predicting the death of print for ages. I don’t think print will go away. Not for a long time. Video is ok too, but I don’t think it is indexible or searchable in the same way that print is. I think the future of books is going to be electronic. Tablets already exist that are computing and media devices, and this is going to continue. More and more, especially with technical books, I think we are going to see the merging of media, so that we have a PDF that includes text, live 3d models, video, and still images. This is possible now. Maybe someone is already doing it. Maybe I’ll create a sample. I think this kind of documentation will be fun to create, and more rewarding to read.