General Autocad Info request

[imtony]

Hello -

I am an instructor in an adult vocational exploration program in the US. One of my students is exploring a career in Structural Engineering. He has experience in the trades. I am looking into Autocad Training Programs available on CD. While comparing them it became obvious to me that I needed to understand some basics of Autocad first, as I have stumbled across numerous types of Autocad programs such as R13, R14, 2000, 2000i, 2002 and 2004. Could I trouble you to briefly explain the differences and do you have any suggestions as to which Training Programs might be better than others. Cost is an important factor in that we are a not-for-profit organization.

Thanks for your time.

[CADTutor]

The different release numbers you cite in your post are simply incremental "improvements" of AutoCAD. Like most software, a new version of AutoCAD appears every 12-18 months. They used to be known by their release number, hence R13 and R14 but are now known by a year marker: 2002 and 2004. 2000i was merely an "internet enabled" version of 2000.

The current version is AutoCAD 2005 and so it probably makes most sense to learn that. There are not great differences between the various releases and Autodesk make it a policy for all AutoCAD versions to be backwards compatible so that if you learned how to use AutoCAD 2000, you should be able to use 2005 with minimal training.

I must admit that I haven't really looked at the CD based training materials. I'm sure they work reasonably well but I think the best method of learning AutoCAD is to do a short introductory course to show you the basics and then follow that up with lots of practice in association with a good reference/tutorial manual such as Ellen Finklestein's AutoCAD Bible.

Others may have different views but as an AutoCAD trainer myself, that's the most effective method I've found.