We wrote this book to address these advances in technology and provide a fresh perspective on using AutoCAD. We are both AutoCAD instructors who come "from the trenches," meaning we have used CAD in the real world, on real projects. Each of us has over 15 years of experience working on both small and large projects, ranging from PCB board design to 18-mile-long light rail systems. Besides CAD design and drafting, we have experience in CAD management, software development, and, of course, education and training. In other words, we've been around the CAD block.

What we noticed is that many of today's AutoCAD books are just updates to books that were originally written years ago when MS-DOS reigned supreme, and you had to know your way around the keyboard. In essence, the way you use AutoCAD has changed but most of the books about AutoCAD have not. We want to present a modern approach to using AutoCAD. We leave "prehistoric" legacy commands and cryptic system variable references to the other books and instead provide fresh, easy-to-understand information so you can quickly get up to speed. That's not to say we don't tackle any complex subjects - we just make them easier for you to teach and for your students to understand and use in their everyday work.

Besides explaining the basics of 2D drafting, we delve into more advanced subjects that other AutoCAD books fail to address sufficiently. We explain in layperson's terms how to:

• manage external reference files (Xrefs) the correct way
• set up and manage paper space layouts with multiple views and scales
• import and format raster images
• share information with other Windows programs using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)
• publish drawings over the Internet using Drawing Web Format (DWF)
• use all of the other latest AutoCAD features

In addition, we use real-world examples as drawing projects. Included in the book are drawings from an actual 30-story office tower and condominium designed and built in Portland, Oregon. We provide examples of drawings from the following design disciplines:

• Architectural
• Civil
• Electrical
• Mechanical
• Plumbing
• HVAC

We show you how these drawings are created from beginning to end as we recreate the project. Included in this process is how to create a complete set of drawings using xrefs, multi-view layouts, and other industry-standard techniques.

Of course, while we provide examples of how to create mechanical drawings, we realize that this is the strong suit of most of the other AutoCAD books already available. We bring an up-to-date perspective to mechanical drawing. How often will you need to draw a "Dovetail Slide" from a piece of equipment that existed in the 1950s anyway? What we DO show you is how to lay out a multi-view mechanical drawing using a CAD-based approach. We realize that AutoCAD is not just a fancy electronic drafting board. There are ways to approach your work using CAD-specific techniques and methods that can make you a much more productive and accurate drafter.

To allow your students to hit the ground running, we provide a "Quick Start" chapter at the beginning of the book that gets users up to speed in no time. Using "Quick Start," students learn the bare minimum so they can quickly create, and even plot, an AutoCAD drawing in one chapter. Each new topic and concept in the Quick Start chapter is linked to a corresponding chapter later in the book, so you can delve into detailed topic instruction as you choose or allow your students to explore each topic in detail at their own pace.

This book provides your students with the knowledge needed to learn AutoCAD as it is being used today in the real world. Working with a set of established industry job requirements, we addressed these job skills in the chapter learning objectives and integrated them into the professional TIPs and NOTEs and the exercises/problems in this book. We provide everything students need to know, starting with drawing their first line to creating DWF files that can be shared with other team members around the world. Stop living in the past and join us as we explore how to use AutoCAD in the 21st century!