Back in the day of R13 and earlier, AutoCAD used to come with enough hard copy manuals to stack 7 or 8 inches high. I’ve still got more than one R13 box, although not all the books. Nowdays you receive a plastic DVD box with a disk. The manuals are still there, they are just in electronic form now.
Some people prefer this method, and it certainly saves tons of paper. I’m sure there were some people who received the giant box of manuals in the old days and never even cracked them. Are you one of the other type? Do you still like a real paper book in your hands? Read on…
Yes, you can still get hard copy Users Guides, and best of all they are FREE. Well, you did pay a huge chunk for the software, but the manuals won’t cost you any more, let’s put it that way. Go to http://www.autodeskbookrequest.com and put in your request. You will need your serial number, and you will be able to get one set for each license that you have. I received mine in about 3 days.
The Users Guide is so large, it’s split into three volumes. The Customization Guide and strangly enough, the VBA and ActiveX developers guide are still available too, though the latter looks unchanged compared to previous years. I say strangly because VBA is on its way out the door, it isn’t even shipped or installed with AutoCAD 2010.
Digital for me, search’ability makes it work much better. Twin screens make it readable while using the app.
Autodesk’s manuals have been getting progressively worse and worse with each release. Electronic format or not, they simply don’t take the time to make sure the books are “mostly” correct anymore.
Release 12 was the last one that had a decent set of books.
i think it’d be novel if you could just GET a manual for products like… oh say Revit 2010 now that the product has shipped.