Book Information

Book ID Asin: 1680453556
Book Title: Fusion 360 for Makers: Design Your Own Digital Models for 3D Printing and CNC Fabrication
Book Author: Lydia Sloan Cline
Book Format and Price:
Book Format Name: Paperback
Book Format Price: unknown
Book Price: unknown
Book Category: Books, Engineering & Transportation, Engineering and unknown
Book Rating: 511 ratings

Book Product Detail

• Best Sellers Rank: #490,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #77 in 3D Printing Books
  • #158 in CAD Graphic Design Guides
  • #180 in Industrial Manufacturing

• Customer Reviews:
  4.4 out of 5 stars 511 ratings

Book Review

Name: Kevin
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Not good for learning parametric modeling
Date: Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2019
Review: I read this entire workbook and did every single exercise cover to cover. I am simultaneously taking a parametric modeling course at my local community college. I do not recommend this book to those who seek to learn how to perform parametric modeling or how to make precise mechanical functional parts. At best, you'll get a surface familiarity with Fusion 360 and you could probably make some aesthetic art models that do not require precise measurements. For example, the car phone assembly exercise "eyeballs" some critical measurements such as the size of the ball socket and the stem slots, but these sizes are critical to functionality of the device. At the end of the exercise, you end up creating something that looks functional, but actually is not because of the lack of precise measurements. Many critical exercise steps in the book also lack adequate explanation or substeps. Compared to my parametric modeling class, this book runs the risk of giving you bad CAD drafting habits, especially for functional modeling. I wish there was more in-depth explanation of the various commands and some good habits and tips for industry-grade CAD designs.

I have had better luck with the CAD textbooks from SDC Publishing, such as "Parametric Modeling with Autodesk Fusion 360." They are more thorough and provide a deeper understanding of the software.

Name: Giles
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A reasonable book, certainly far short of excellent
Date: Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2019
Review: Fusion 360 is an excellent CAD program for designing stuff to make on your 3D printer. Many people begin Computer Aided Design with a simple program like Tinkercad, because it can be mastered in a weekend, but because of that it is extremely limited, and because relatively simply tasks, like rounding the corners of a box (filleting edges), can be quite labor intensive. Fusion 360 is a huge leap forward. It is complex and powerful and the most difficult part is simply getting started. Once you get a foothold into how the software operates, then you can happily build on your ever expanding experience and become proficient. (Rather like learning organic chemistry, if you don't grasp the first few lectures, don't ever expect to catch up!)
Fortunately, Lydia Sloan Cline's book begins slowly, so you can begin to make headway with Fusion 360 quite quickly. Also, she makes a commendable effort to define terms that are used throughout the book early on. The problems really show up later in the book when the explanations for some of the commands are so vague that it is almost impossible to learn how to use them. For example: The Sweep Command (page 69), is relegated to three and a half lines and 3 diagrams that are so indistinct as to be practically useless. After a couple of hours of frustration with not getting the command to work, it came to me that the two main parameters (profile and path) had to be on different planes. Naturally, once I saw this, it was obvious. But would it have been too much effort to mention it? Which brings me to my next point: the book is filled with blank spaces. At a guess I would think that 25% of the book is empty space. What a perfect opportunity to add boxes of tips, such as: "Be sure to have the Profile and Path parameters on different planes or the Sweep Command will not work". (I use the blank spaces to write my own notes from tips gleaned from YouTube videos that are often excellent).
Hopefully the book will be revised before the next edition. A little effort could turn a somewhat useful book into a worthwhile volume. In its present state it would be overly generous to give it even a B minus grade.

Name: Cruz Carpenter
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great place to get started with Fusion 360
Date: Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2018
Review: Fusion 360 is a powerful professional design tool I spent time learning recently. I really wish this book was available when I started learning to use Fusion 360 for my home-based 3D printing projects. “Fusion 360 for Makers” would have saved me a lot of time getting started. Lydia’s book gives a great introduction to Fusion 360 and a lot easier follow than watching and rewinding You Tube videos when looking for how to accomplish certain aspects of creating models in 360. I know I am interested in learning how to sculpt as I have the basics of 3D design, Fusion 360 for Makers has a good introduction to sculpting and this is exactly what I was looking for… Thank you!

Name: Amazon Customer
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Pretty basic, but a good start
Date: Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2019
Review: This does a decent job of explaining how to use Fusion 360, but it doesn't really do a great job of explaining the best way to do things in Fusion 360, or why you'd want to approach things in any particular manner. I'm not great with F360, but I didn't feel like I got a ton out of it, and there were quite a few points where I would have done things differently than the author did them. On the other hand, if I'd had this a month or two earlier, I probably would have shaved quite a bit of time off of my learning curve, and it's never *wrong*, from what I could see.

I found Shih's Parametric Modeling with Autodesk Fusion 360 (Spring 2018 Edition) to be much more useful, but it's quite a bit more expensive as well.

Name: Wombat37
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: It's too out of date
Date: Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2019
Review: Fusion 360 is a very powerful software program and can be easy to use - but there's a long learning curve. I installed this software and found that after a few hours, I couldn't really do anything useful with it because it wasn't very intuitive to use.

I decided to buy this book so that I could learn how to use this software properly. Unfortunately, the current software distributed by Autodesk (v 2.0.6658) is very different from that described in this book and I found that I was just as confused as I was before buying the book. This is not the author's fault. These differences are significant - functions have been renamed, removed, added or moved to new locations. Just following the examples in the book is almost impossible as a beginner.

In the end, I simply gave up and bought a different book: "Autodesk Fusion 360 For Beginners - Part 1: Part Modeling" which was up to date and I quickly became adept at using this software. Now I can go back to the book reviewed here and understand much more of the content and so it has finally become useful to me.

Bottom line - don't get this if you're new to Fusion 360. It will just confuse you.

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