4 comments about Southwest Home Plans: 138 Sun-Loving Designs for Building Anywhere.

1. It's the best I've found for true SW style homeplans, but many of the plans are not SW -- just houses with tile roofs. They're all 2,000 sq. ft & up, many twice that size, which puts them out of reach for me (too expensive to build)



2. However I just wished there had been more real life photos instead of the monochrome sketches to help actually visualize what the house would look like after construction. Definitely useful for someone planning to build adobe style.



3. Although the book does have a few Pueblo-style plans like those featured on the front and back cover, very little of the book is devoted to them. Most of the houses it contains are what I would term as fairly traditional, nonsouthwestern houses; their tile roofs seem to be the basis for their inclusion. I have yet to find a good collection or two of southwestern plans. Most of the floor plans were unappealing to me as well.



4. If you are looking for a book with ideas of "pueblo style" or southwestern adobe style homes, this is not it. The cover is misleading, leading you to believe this book contains many if not all, this style. There are only a few (count 3 or 4) plans in the true pueblo style.

No comments about Designing the Worlds Best Resorts: Designing the World's Best (Designing the World's Best Series).

No comments about New Glass Architecture.

1 comments about Drafting and Design for Architecture.

1. A very good helping hand to students. covers a very broad range of topics such as architectural history (brief summary only), drafting materials, rendering, site planning.

No comments about Pools DesignSource.

No comments about Village and Farm Cottages.

No comments about House Design (Daab Design Book).

No comments about Early Victorian House Designs.

1 comments about Mastering AutoCAD 2002 (With CD-ROM).

1. This book is far from ideal. My background is computers, and I'm used to documentation being written to tell me what I need to know, quickly. This book is a set of tutorials--it is NOT a reference. When I need to know something specific this book is nearly useless. If you don't really know what you want to learn and want to be led through a series of exercises this book may be useful. However, if you're starting from zero, I recommend "AutoCAD 2002: No Experience Required" by David Frey, which is written much more clearly and will more quickly give you a taste of all (or most) elements of AutoCAD. Omura's book required spending too much time on things I didn't need to know to get to what I did want to know.

   Another major complaint is that this book is loaded with typos and errors. Clearly it was not proofread. Numbers in examples don't add up (example: last paragraph on p. 221: two times twelve is NOT forty-eight), assumptions are made about all settings being in their default positions (not safe if you're using someone else's computer) and commands that have not yet been covered are referred to. In the chapter on AutoLISP both the first and the second example programs have typos in them and if you don't have a programming background you could tear your hair out trying to figure out what you're doing wrong. I started to keep a list of all the errors I found, but it seems there's one every couple of pages. (Incidentally, I didn't find a single typo in David Frey's book, and I went through the entire thing.)

   Finally I should mention the CD-ROM. The first thing this CD-ROM did was crash the computer I was using. After rebooting--twice--it still crashed when trying to run the installation program. This was running a recent installation of Windows ME with over 500MB of RAM. I was able to copy the example files off the disc manually, but this whole package clearly meets a very low standard of quality assurance.

   Fortunately I'm about at the point where I'm able to find what I need in the online documentation, and this book was not completely useless in teaching me enough to reach that point. However, I find it hard to imagine there isn't something far superior out there that I could have used instead. This book could be worse, but it's far from ideal.

1 comments about Blueprint Reading for Electricians.

1. I am totally disappointed in this book. It would be alot easier to do a Goggle search of electrician symbols than to try and use this book. It is suppose to be for electricians but it lacks any foundation for the electrician. The main reason I dislike this book, it has no substance just electricial symbols, no explanations, no discussion of what the electrician needs to focus on, and the worst part, the graphics are small and not well done at all. Full of useless information, for example, I want to learn about electrical blueprints so they had to include door schedules,etc.etc. just fill material to sell a book.