I can Not suggest any book other that the help file. As mentioned on gets a bit too deep, and the other is fraught with errors and omissions. I have worked with several students for whom these books become paper weights.
Study the help file, and go watch the recorded demos at the C3D community page of Autodesk, and keep you cash for something you can use.
Hi Mike
I'm sorry to hear you feel this way about Mastering. I know you had expressed some distaste for the text in the past. While you and I don't always seem to see eye-to-eye, I (along with the other authors) valued your opinion and experience enough to send you a free copy of Mastering Civil 3D 2008 and ask for your feedback to improve forthcoming revised book (Mastering Civil 3D 2009), as well as subsquent printings of the 2008 Mastering book, and a new book (Introducing Civil 3D 2009).
Perhaps you had other things on your plate at the time, but you didn't really have much to offer except some comments about TIN lines and a little bit about the pipe network parts chapter.
My personal mission is to get information out to the Civil 3D using public through whatever avenues possible. It may sound corny, but my goal has always been to get people using Civil 3D because I see it as a vehicle to improve design. The more interations we can do, the more we can eliminate CAD mistakes and labeling annoyances, the more time we can spent trying new things and iterating more. Last year, I saw writing a that would appear in mainstream bookshops and online retailers to be a logical step in that process.
While Mastering Civil 3D is not the book of my dreams, putting it together was an education. For the new books we have a better understanding of the publishing business (working with editors, deadlines and production complications) and we also sought better tech editors.
I put out several "calls for feedback" on the Autodesk discussion group, and by asking you for your feedback, and surprisingly, I received mostly crickets in response.
Each author has used the text for class instruction and this exercise gave us more ideas to improve the book, make it more readable, more instructive. All things considered, I am still quite proud of the entire text, and the 400 pages that I personally wrote.
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Here are some of the items that I am most proud of (and that I am pretty sure they cannot be found anywhere else), and that I personally flip to as a reminder and reference:
Chapter 6: Parcels, especially the sidebar on pages 201- 204 where I document guidelines for subdivision based on methods I worked out during creating several thousand parcel iterations for many preliminary site plans and final record plats during the Winter of 2005-2006 in Civil 3D 2006 HF2. The processes still apply today. Also, this chapter includes a refined version of the original "Parcel Rules" post from Civil 3D Rocks that explains, in laymans terms, how best to exploit the planar graph.
Chapter 11: Corridors: especially the "common corridor problems" sections and detailed look "under the hood" of corridor surface construction
Chapter 12: Corridors: especially the "common corridor problems" sections based on many of my own frustrations encountered working out corridor best practices during the design and modeling of ten residential street projects (each containing about 20 roads plus intersections and cul de sacs) while doing freelance cad/design work between 7/2006 and 4/2007.
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While we are limited in what we can change at this time since our deadline is upon us, I would still like to hear feedback about how the text can be improved. If we can't incorporate the feedback in the book, perhaps we can work it into one of our weekly eeCasts, blog posts or something else.
Sincerely,
Dana Breig Probert
one of four authors of Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008
and writer at
www.civil3drocks.com and
www.civil3d.com