It’s amazing to think that AutoCAD came into being over two decades ago,
at a time when most people thought that personal computers weren’t
capable of industrial-strength tasks like CAD. (The acronym stands for
Computer-Aided Drafting, Computer-Aided Design, or both, depending on
whom you talk to). It’s almost as amazing that, 20 years after its birth,
AutoCAD remains the king of the microcomputer CAD hill by a tall margin.
Many competing CAD programs have come to challenge AutoCAD, many have
fallen, and a few are still around. One hears rumblings that the long-term
future of CAD may belong to special-purpose, 3D-based software such as the
Autodesk Inventor and Revit programs. Whether or not those rumblings
amplify into a roar remains to be seen, but for the present and the near future
anyway, AutoCAD is where the CAD action is.

In its evolution, AutoCAD has grown more complex, in part to keep up with
the increasing complexity of the design and drafting processes that AutoCAD
is intended to serve. It’s not enough just to draw nice-looking lines anymore.
If you want to play CAD with the big boys and girls, you need to organize the
objects you draw, their properties, and the files in which they reside in
appropriate ways. You need to coordinate your CAD work with other people
in your office who will be working on or making use of the same drawings.
You need to be savvy about shipping drawings around via the Internet.

AutoCAD 2005 provides the tools for doing all these things, but it’s not always
easy to figure out which hammer to pick up or which nail to bang on first.
With this book, you have an excellent chance of creating a presentable,
usable, printable, and sharable drawing on your first or second try without
putting a T square through your computer screen in frustration.