I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show
wrote back on Mon, 17 Jan 2005 17:07:15 GMT in
rec.crafts.metalworking :

You're not gonna like this, but. . .

AFIK there is no easy way to learn Autocad. It is an inherently
un-simple program, both because of what it does and because of its
design. (Last time I looked the macro langauge for Autocad was a
version of LISP!) Almost no one really 'learns Autocad' in the way
that you learn, say, Excel. Instead most people become familar enough
with the features and add-ons they need to do a specific job or jobs
and ignore the rest of the program.

While some people have picked it up on their own, the usual way to
learn Autocad is to take a couple of courses in it. Even then you're
still on the learning curve for a couple of years and you never really
stop learning.

It's a professional's tool and learning it is a profession all its
own. Correspondingly it is extremely powerful and flexible, but that's
not much compensation when you're trying to get a handle on it.

At the tech college where I learned machining, Autocad was a one (maybe
two) year program all to itself.

All that to learn how to draw circles, squares and triangles :-).

--
pyotr filipivich.
as an explaination for the decline in the US's tech edge, James
Niccol wrote "It used to be that the USA was pretty good at
producing stuff teenaged boys could lose a finger or two playing with."