It took me a while to absorb enough information in the book ‘Mastering Autodesk Inventor 2016 and Autodesk Inventor LT 2016’ to provide a decent enough review, and let me tell you… it has a ton of information. This instructional book by Paul Munford and Paul Normand is very thorough and detailed. It provides guidance for anyone using Inventor 2016 to explore all of the fundamental features of the software. Although I would definitely say the writing style and layout of the chapters is geared towards the beginner Inventor user or a user attempting to expand their knowledge beyond the very basic functions of the software, an Inventor user with any level of proficiency can benefit from having this book on their shelf.

The book originally published in 2008 by the “legendary Dennis Jeffrey” has been passed along over the years and for the 2016 edition, published by this generations legendary Inventor expert Paul Munford, who most people know as CADSetterOut across the internet. It now is a 1,048 page behemoth of information and accompanying dataset files that can be downloaded from the publishers website.

The functions of Inventor are broken down quite nicely into logical chapters that flow well into each other. If you’re already an avid Inventor user, you may get quite bored if you decide to read the book through because there isn’t a good guide provided to show what functions in Inventor were upgraded from previous Inventor versions. It would be nice if there was a cross reference to follow if you’re using a specific previous version of Inventor. You can still use the book to focus on areas you want to improve on or get stuck with if the upgrade is different enough from previous versions.

I would definitely recommend this book if you’re the self taught type that wants to accelerate your learning. This book will help you do that. This is also a good buy for your companies engineering department to keep on the shelf and use as a reference for your team. If you bring new people in that don’t have a strong background in Inventor, this book would be a good starting point for them.

There isn’t much about the book I don’t like, it’s written in simplex terms and doesn’t overly confuse the reader by jumping around. The examples are straightforward and most pages include well thought out screen shots to show the reader what is being instructed and what you should be seeing on your screen. The only nuisances that I found in the book are those that I see in other Autodesk material, and of course this might just be my picky nature but I like to comply with the standards I use for drawings so it drives me a little crazy to see lowercase text on drawings.

The book is available in paperback or e-print. Where can you get the book? Click the links below:

Publisher (Wiley)

Amazon

Read the Design & Motion review of ‘Mastering Autodesk Inventor 2016’

Mastering Inventor 2016 by Paul Munford