Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Although I was proficient with AutoCAD, I didn't have any experience with Revit before I purchased this book. I have now gone through the entire volume, reading every word and following along with every example.
The book takes the form of a step-by-step tutorial: the author gives you instructions, and you follow his instructions in order to learn the software. For the most part, this system works well. The tutorial addresses most aspects of Revit, and by the end of the book I felt that I could use the software proficiently in an office environment. The author gives good explanations of why you are doing each process, although he omits to tell you the purpose of each step. (For example, he might tell you to click a specific checkbox in a dialog box, without explaining what that checkbox is for. Brief parenthetic comments to that end would have been nice.)
There is a real problem with quality control in the book, however. Other readers have commented on the east-west discrepancies in the book; the author might tell you to modify the east entrance when he means the west entrance, for example. This flaw didn't really bother me, as there are plenty of helpful illustrations in the book, so it's usually possible to figure out which side of the building he really means. The bigger issue has to do with the sloppiness of the tutorial procedures. Many of the steps that the author tells you to make do not work properly. That is, he might say "do X, and Y will happen," but the program might not allow you to do X, or when you do X, Y does NOT happen. Other times, the instructions are confusing or even incomplete. I once spent 30 minutes trying to troubleshoot my model, only to realize that the author had omitted to tell me to click a certain button. These errors are rare in the first few chapters, but become increasingly common later in the book. Chapter 21 is particularly bad in this regard; the author even has you modifying a wall that does not exist, if you follow his instructions! It seems likely that the book's procedures were never independently tested by someone untrained in Revit.
I don't know if there is a better book for learning Revit. This one will certainly work - just be prepared to encounter a fair number of unexpected problems, and to figure out solutions to them on your own.
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