People who go to the SolidWorks user group on Deja News know Dave Murray as a regular poster who really knows his stuff; his book confirms the breadth of his knowledge, and does it in the same easy to access style that he writes with to the newsgroup. I had been a 40+ hour a week user of SolidWorks for over a year when I ran across Inside SolidWorks. Reading this book got me excited, because even after all of my time with the software (with tons of experimentation and late nights attempting to create 'challenging' parts) this book opened my eyes to a lot of stuff that I would have never thought to try on my own and would otherwise have had no real good reason to know. Every few pages I ran across a little nugget that increased my productivity, or encouraged me to try something I didn't know was possible. Though the majority of it will be review, I think that advance users will get their 50 bucks worth just out of learning a few things that will get them home a little earlier. (note to advanced users: don't expect to learn much new stuff about sweeps, lofts, or filleting. In depth details on these black arts are beyond the scope of this book)
It's beginners, however, that will realize the greatest benefit. After doing the standard 30 minute jump start tutorial, I would recommend that a new guy put aside the tutorial book that comes with the software and instead spend their time digging into Inside SolidWorks. It does a very clear job of introducing the software (especially the mindset required for modeling with a feature based modeler), with a special focus on how to avoid the standard problems and sidestep the pitfalls that new users usually encounter. I wish that I had Inside SolidWOrks when going through the steep part of my learning curve.
The big disappointment with the book? Like most SolidWorks tutorials, this book almost completely sidesteps the most challenging and potentially rewarding part of using the software: building parts in the context of an assembly (what is often called the 'top down' method). An extra chapter on 'in context relationships', good modeling practices when building parts from inside assemblies, and a good introduction on how parametric relationships can make or destroy your parts would have made this a five star book. Every user who builds from the top down knows the crushing pain of moving a component in an assembly and seeing the feature trees of some or all of his/her components turn red with rebuild errors (the guy I sit next to refers to this phenomenon as seeing his screen fill with blood); I would have liked to see the author tackle this complicated issue with the same thoroughness and competence that he approaches all of the other subjects
