Check it Out: The CAD Professional's Guide to Lightning-Fast R&D

Marketing departments love to slap the word “eBook” on the cover of short white papers, essays, reports, and so forth. Perhaps this is an attempt to gin up a bit o’ buzz when they’re struggling to jazz up a blurb about a few hundred words and some pictures neatly organized into a PDF. I dunno. Look, a PDF is fine. I read and recommend that you read tons of truly great PDFs. Still, a plain old PDF is passive reading, even if there’s a link to the company at the end. An eBook, however, uses both content and PDF technology to make the information it imparts broader and interactive. Today’s Check It Out link takes you to a real eBook.

"The CAD Professional’s Guide to Lightning-Fast R&D" from 3D Connexion is big, wide-ranging, and fun to be with. It’s for people wanting to make their workflows, workgroup, and/or organization more efficient and modern. That could mean a manager looking to increase productivity, a CAD maven angling for the next career move, or just a dude or dudette with a home office and a pocket full of dreams.

The eBook’s plot outline is familiar to DE readers: Design to market cycles are getting faster. To compete, you need to leverage automation, streamline processes, collaborate, and adopt new tools and new tactics to make your R&D as efficient as possible. This eBook is intended to show you how.

Now, you might interpret “show you how” as “buy a 3D Connexion 3D mouse.” Well, duh. Of course 3D Connexion wants you to consider that. But it’s a confident enough outfit that it doesn’t feel inclined to push the hype. See, this eBook is really about equipping design and mechanical engineers with all sorts of new tools that augment, extend, support, speed up, and streamline how they work. A 3D mouse is part of that bigger tool chest. Just like robust graphics processing, PDM, 3D printing, and so on, a 3D mouse can bring new productivity to your design cycles.

This eBook covers continuing engineering skill enhancement, 3D CAD, 3D printing, cloud computing, Lean methodology, online videos and conferencing, smartphones, and mobile computing, to name just a few. You’ll find case studies, and data from reports, research studies, and surveys. It provides insights from books that you should read. And it recommends apps that can help compress workflows, foster collaboration, and even make your workday just that much easier.

The eBook has five sections, and not every topic in them will come as a complete revelation to DE readers. But what will delight you throughout is that there are links to supplemental information everywhere. Have you been meaning to look into WikiSpaces, FocusBooster, or TurboViewer? They’re linked, and so too are something like 22 other tools alone. Interested in a research study on videoconferencing, a poll by ASME, a book that was mentioned, you can click to get more details on them. Links to the companies in the case studies who use some of these tools are there too.

And on it goes: 40 pages of productivity tips, recommendations, statistics, and strategies. "The CAD Professional’s Guide to Lightning-Fast R&D" itself in the end is just the beginning of a comprehensive resource for re-engineering your design environment. Great fun it is. This piece of work is a fine example of what can be done when you really want to make an eBook. You can download a complimentary copy from the link over there.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

The CAD Professional’s Guide to Lightning-Fast R&D