As now we have 2013 products coming, 2013 books are also available. These books currently available for pre-order on Amazon, and should be available on local book store soon.

I have compiled them, and you may want to check if they suit your needs.

Find all Autodesk Official Training Guides 2013 here (disclosure: if you purchased on that page, I will get a small share from Amazon).

1. Do you work at small business company? It means less than 300 employees.
2. Is your company based in US or Canada?
3. And do you use outdated Autodesk software? It means version 2008 or older.

If all of the answers above it yes, then you are eligible to join Autodesk and Lenovo technology makeover contest.

Join the contest, and you can win five Lenovo ThinkStation workstation and five Autodesk suites licenses (you even can choose which suite!).

If you are interested, see the details in this Business Wire news. Or see in this AutoCAD facebook page. I think the facebook page is limited to US and Canada visitors only, I only see restricted warning :(

So go ahead. You might be the lucky one!

Today I get the great news: Our own AutoCAD Block Best Practices e-book is approved an can be purchased from AutoCAD exchange store!

The payment is available through PayPal only, with the same price as we offer here.

If you want to purchase it from app store, you can find it under learning tools and productivity tools category. You have to open AutoCAD Exchange from within AutoCAD, you can’t do it just using regular browser.

I also have problem with search tool, so you might need to navigate to the last page of the app list. (Is it just me, or the app have problem with the search engine?)

Here is the sales page on the app store:

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If you haven’t, why not considering to give them cool learning materials like CAD books, or training video? We can recommend you these.

Autodesk Official Training Guides

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Autodesk Official Training Guides (AOTG) are great books for learning Autodesk applications. Those books were reviewed by Autodesk itself, and approved it for self learning and as guide in training classes.

Do you intend to get Autodesk certification test? Based on my experience, this is the best resource to learn for your preparation.

We compiled all AOTG titles. If you are interested, you can see all the title in our e-store here. You can purchase them online from Amazon, or find them in local book store near you.

Infinite Skills training video

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Books are great. But if you think your friend don’t like reading books, you can consider to give them training on their desktop: a training video. These training videos are great alternative if you are too busy to attend training classes, so you can use it at your own pace when you have time. It’s also a good alternative if you prefer training but can’t find training center near you that can provide those classes.

If you see the author profile, I believe they are the one of the best in trainings. They also have years of teaching experience.

If you are interested to see the titles, you can see them in our e-store here.

Infinite Skills also published dozens of training video. If you want to get non CAD training video (Windows, Office, WordPress, etc.) you can see the complete titles here.

Disclosure: I will get share if you purchase book from Amazon and training video from Infinite Skills using those links.

Last, but not least: our own e-books

We also have several e-book titles. Our best seller is AutoCAD Block Best Practices. We also have other titles here.

You may find it hard to imagine wrapping e-book in pdf format and give them to your friends. But I’ve seen some people are being creative, burn them in a small CD and wrap it nicely.

If you still can’t find a perfect gift, they can be nice alternative. Don’t you think?

This forum is provided for you who purchased our e-books. At the moment we only grant access for you who purchased AutoCAD Block Best Practices. We will add more forums for other e-books as necessary gradually.

This forum is not intended for general discussion, but it is a place where you can ask questions related to our e-books. There are already many great CAD forums out there, adding another one is really not a good idea.

So who is this forum for?

If you have problem following the tutorial, missing exercise files, and other related topics. It is also where you can help the others with that specific topic, share your ideas, showcase your blocks, etc… related to the e-book contents.

For you who already purchased 1st edition of Block Book, are also eligible to register to our support forum. As a bonus to you, you can download the new edition for free! It’s our appreciation for you who supported us to continue running this site.

You need to register and login to the forum. After you login you can find the download link in the support forum.

As you may already know, the new edition price is US$ 14.95.

We provide this free download for limited time, until the end of December. So if you are interested, you need to hurry.

Approval will be done manually, and we need to check your email with our transaction database. It may take time to approve your account.

I hope this forum can be useful for all of us. I hope you like this forum, and our e-books!

However, this is not always true.

Sometimes user just open their application and use for ten minutes. After he finished, he just left and don’t close their application. The license is still checked out to this computer, and can’t be used by the others.

On busy day, there will be a good chance many users from different department use the licenses. It might be one department use most of the licenses and other department just get a couple of licenses.

You may also want to limit licenses that can be accessed by users, not opening AutoCAD with Product Design Suite for example. This can happen in mixed product environment, Autodesk use cascading license. It’s a good concept, but it can be a disaster if we don’t manage it properly.

There are many possibilities that can make things go wrong if we don’t control network license usage.

If you’re the one who are responsible for managing license, then you can have many complaints about controlling available licenses.

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You can set timeout, reserve license for important users, set maximum number of licenses for a group, and many more by using option file. It can optimize license usage. If your company has mixed Autodesk products licenses, then you need to seriously consider setting this up.

If you are interested to learn more about Autodesk option file, read this white paper from Autodesk: http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1055247

If you want to see details of Autodesk network licensing configuration, see the complete guide here: http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1076366

Do you realize that there are hundreds of CAD applications out there? If you’re currently planning to purchase new CAD application, I mean not only purchasing additional seats, but trying to catch up with all those new technology… aren’t they confused you?

One interesting thing about choosing a CAD application, it’s often not because it’s feature. Not because it’s better than its competitors.

I’ve seen an international company decided to switch to other CAD package here, because it’s not easy to find people who can use theirs. So their HQ still use CAD A, here they use CAD B.

I also see people chose a CAD application because their project owner told them to use it. I’ve seen people chose it because of its price.

You probably have your own reason that I probably never knew before. Would you care to share it here?

I’m also wondering… how many of you actually chose a CAD program because you think it is better than its competitor?

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Thank you to Patrick Hughes for the heads up. If you want to see the discussion on CAD Tutor forum, you can find it here.