On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:45:27 +1100, "Tom Miller"
wrote:

Autocad is about as handy as pockets in your underpants.

With perhaps a hole in the pocket? G

AutoCad is worth learning if one is going to use it a lot -- and if
one can get someone else to buy it. It doesn't provide any basic
capability that others like TurboCAD lack, but once learned it is
enormously faster and easier to use if one is a facile typist and
learns the keyboard commands that are useful to him.

I can do a 2D drawing in AutoCAD faster than I could do it by hand and
scan it. That's not a brag; it's just that I've been using it since
R12 for DOS so the parts of it I use are as familiar to me as an old
pair of pliers. I pretend no mastery of it, but it does what I want
to do very quickly and easily, far more so than using a pencil and
Vemco. (Young readers, the Vemco was a sliderule era "drafting
machine".) Using TurboCAD feels to me like stirring peanut
butter. It can get it done, but it is gawd-awful tedious.

I didn't learn ACAD in a evening, but I think one could get cookin'
with it in a week of evenings as another poster suggested.

One needn't learn and master every feature. Hands-on practice with
one's own project and a good reference is far better than trying to
"learn from a book" because you then learn the stuff that enables you
to do what you want to do, nevermind the stuff you don't care about.
The trouble with books is that they try to be all things to all
readers. Some of the Dummies books are good in that they serve as
easily-accessed references. Start doing, consult book to discover
how to do each operation that you want to do. Facility and
familiarity will come after you've done that with a number of
projects, just like welding, using a lathe or any skill.