Google SketchUp 7 For Dummies

I am a retired professional engineer, architect, and 3D graphics artist/instructor. I have been using SketchUp Pro for about 3 years mainly for creating Earth and space structures that I later import into Daz Bryce for rendering. This well written, light-hearted, and extremely thorough book is an essential asset for begineers and a valuable reference tool for anyone using SketchUp. Computer software manual writers can often times get over zealous with methods and confuse everyone but themselves. Fortunately Aidan Chopra is not one of those people. If you want to draw most anything you can imagine you need to do two things. First download the free version of SketchUp and second buy this book. You will be very pleased with both actions.

I bought the book because I wanted to get started using SketchUp to draw a house construction plan. I wanted to see what the house would look like in 3-dimension. I reviewed the on-line training files and got a good understanding of what SketchUp could do, but, as one might expect, there was not a lot of "how-to-get-started" information.
The book is well written and easy to follow. It is set up based on a training theory I like, trial and error. The base example is a house sketch with vague dimensions. As you begin to follow the instructions, you make mistakes. You quickly learn how to erase your mistakes and re-start. After a bit, I began to have something worth saving. Once saved, it became a means of re-starting after "big" mistakes.
It is truly a learn-by-doing tool.
I haven't used the book for the more complex features of the program.
I got what I wanted and the price of the book was a small price to pay for the lesson.
I used to use MacDraw years ago on a Mac. This is the best casual drawing tool I've seen since then.

This book along with the online videos will get you up and running fast. It's see one, read one, now do one. The online videos are the key to doing the book as sometimes the books doesn't contain all the information for completing the project. So you have to write down the dimensions from the video into the book. This is what I did and I was able to follow along with the book and complete the projects. In a word "excellent."

Google SketchUp is free!
This book is $14.99 with free Amazon Prime shipping!
There are 54 Utube video tutorials by the author with another three dozen on the way which are free supplements to the book!

This SketchUP 7 for Dummies book is a good basic intro to SketchUP, but does not cover any intermediate or advanced topics or skills (except it does cover "Photo Match" modeling from photos OK). If you bought his previous book, (not a "Dummies" book) on SketchUP 6 you probably need not buy this book... this is virtually that book, word for word, and picture by picture (It was pretty good too), with just a little bit of new info on things like Dynamic Components. I wish the book went just a little deeper into the topics covered...its a bit too surface in coverage. It also does not cover some entire aspects of both the FREE as well as the PRO versions. The biggest weakness of this book (and his previous book) is the quality of the illustrations. These COULD be very good and helpful. They are primarily screen shots of the program in use. However they are so small, low contrast, and fuzzy that the important info supposedly being conveyed is hard to glean. SketchUP works so easy because of clever, simple use of COLOR, THICKNESS and DASHES etc of lines... these are crucial to use (and see). The illustrations fail to capture these well. As screen shots it would have been very easy to spend a few seconds with each image in a simple image editor enhancing contrast, etc. The writing style is friendly, easy to understand, and clear. IF the images were handled better, and larger, this would be an EXCELLENT beginning intro book; as it is, it is GOOD book.