AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

How This Book Is Organized

Appearances can be deceptive. For example, had you wandered into my office and seen the apparently random piles of stuff that covered my desk while I was writing this book, you might wonder how I could possibly organize a sentence, let alone an entire book. But — given a suitable degree of concerted thought — I know exactly where to put my hands on that list of new dimension variables, my bag of ½″ binder clips, or the rest of that bagel and cream cheese I started at coffee break.

I hope you'll find that the book also reflects some concerted thought about how to present AutoCAD in a way that's both easy-to-dip-into and smoothly-flowing-from-beginning-to-end.

The organization of this book into parts — collections of related chapters — is one of the most important, uh, parts of this book. You really can get to know AutoCAD one piece at a time, and each part represents a group of closely related topics. The order of parts also says something about priority; yes, you have my permission to ignore the stuff in later parts until you've mastered most of the stuff in the early ones. This kind of building-block approach can be especially valuable in a program as complex as AutoCAD.

The following sections describe the parts that the book breaks down into.

Part I: AutoCAD 101

Need to know your way around the AutoCAD screen? Why does AutoCAD even exist, anyway? What are all the different AutoCAD-based products that Autodesk sells, and should you be using one of them ...