1.0

I have to admire anyone that takes it upon themselves to write and publish their own book. It is a great deal of time, hard work, and expense.

Rather than a ProE Wildfire tutorial, the author has decided to create a book that "addresses theories and issues ... rather than a blow-by-blow tutorial". The layout of the book in three basic levels - from beginner to advanced and provides a brief explanation of the Wildfire 5 commands and their options.

As you can see from the link to the Contents page, the author begins with the basics:
What is CAD, the user interface, and geometry selection.

Level-1 covers sketching and simple feature creation:
Sketching, Base Features, Engineering Features, Shell, Reference Geometry, Edit Features, Pattern, Managing the Model, and Assemblies.

Level-2 continues with more in depth explanations of feature creation:
Swept Blend, Patterns, Advanced Rounds, Curve Thru Points, Variable Section Sweep, and finally Relations - Mathematically Controlling the Model.

Level-3 dives into Top Down Design, Skeleton Modeling and Surfacing with Wildfire 5 - clearly this is where the author is in his comfort zone: Advanced Assemblies, Assembly Operations, more Patterns, View Manager, Skeleton Based Surface Modeling, Analysis Tools, Boundary Blend Surface Feature, ISDX: Interactive Surface Design Extension, and concludes with some Examples: Scoops and Bulges,

There is a brief section on Engineering Drawings includes the following topics:
Engineering Drawings, View Types, Detailing, General Assy and BOM, Explode States.

The final section briefly touches on Customization: Configuration files, Mapkeys and Toolbars.

Many examples throughout the book refer the reader to instructional videos the author has created for YouTube. Like the PTC web-based instruction, the reader is walked thru the construction process of various design features. In general, these videos are informative, however, Videos-055 through 072 were not listed on the YouTube site.

Now the hard part...

Writing a book such as this (or any book for that matter), requires a strict discipline, proofreading, editing and re-writing.

This book would have been greatly enhanced by a through proofread and editing.

The quality of the topic is dragged down by the lack of proper punctuation, problems with singular/plural words and ambiguous sentence structure. Fragments sentences, misuse of joining commas and bracketing commas makes for a very difficult read. Additionally, the British spelling of some words may also throw off many American readers who are not familiar with how things are written 'across the pond'.

In addition to the bad punctuation and poor grammar, there are obvious mistakes. For example: When discussing the topic of Parent Child Relationships and Circular References (page 58), the author advises: "Make sure you do create unsound or circular references."

What is the intended target audience?
As an instructor at a university, I assume the author's target audience would be students entering into the exciting world of mechanical engineering. That said, I've found there are very few books (even poorly written ones) that a reader can't garner some useful tidbit of information. The question then becomes, is the amount of information and knowledge gained balanced by the cost of the material?

Improvements-
A rear index may increase the usefulness of the book as a Wildfire Command Reference Manual. Without an index, it is difficult to locate all the pages that may contain relevant information on specific commands.

In this digital age, this book may have been presented better as an e-book with word search functions and built-in links to the web-based tutorial videos. As an electronic document, readers could then help to proofread, offer corrections, and provide additional information.

In general, I found this book to be somewhat disappointing. I hope the author considers this book a 'work in progress' and continues to correct and improve the quality of the material presented.

Cheers

CadZukes Zorbino 2010-04-13