Learning Advantage Membership/self paced courses and assesments

[rvenzon]

Just wondering if anyone has purchased or had their company purchase the Learning Advantage Membership? They are available on the Siemens website training section and give you on-line access to .

I am self-teaching myself with the aid of the tuorials on NXcast.

A lot of the subject headings are similar or the same. Is there a lot or any difference? In other words is it worth the $200-300/year membership?

 

[Dave K]

Our company has Learning Advantage, and although I didn't compare the training side by side with CAST, they did look very similar.

-Dave
Everything should be designed as simple as possible, but not simpler.

 

[grantmi1]

We mostly use igetit training and have found it very helpful and inexpensive but we are also looking into training advantage to supplement it.

Michael Grant
US Digital
-NX 5 Mach 4
-SolidWorks 2008

 

[rvenzon]

Thanks for the feedback.

Can anyone suggest some literature? I'm looking at "Basic and Intermediate NX4 Modeling, Drafting, and Assemblies" by Stephen Samuel...

I find that books are hard to come by in store and even the selection on-line is limited.

 

[hudson888]

I'm reading Terry Pratchett at the moment he's much more entertaining that any dry old CAD manual.

Books on NX are pretty thin on the ground anyway. What I suspect that you want to do is learn how to use it. So for a beginner my advice is always. Open your first part, click on modelling and if you can figure out just enough to customize your interface to turn on all the icons then you should be able to go through them clicking on each one and then hit F1 for help. That in itself is a valuable learning exercise. What you discover for yourself always outlasts anything you could have force fed to you in a course or a written text, but don't expect everything of that exercise or you'll spend forever in the endeavour. You may look at several functions and realise that you'll probably never need to use that one, others will seem meaningless until later on. But if you stick with it for a day I guarantee that by the end of the first day you'll know what you don't know. That way when you settle on a course you should find that it fills in gaps in ways that if it is not a good or worthwhile teaching document then you'll know right away that you're not seeing information missing from you initial overview of the system. Few courses actually go deeper than the documentation provided with the system, but good ones are easier to follow and put together the strategies you need for combining all those commands into usefull models. If you have previously learned another CAD system this is what you need most of all for NX.

I like myigetit.com over most of what is available. CAST is okay but the interface is annoying unless maybe if you have two screens.

Cheers

Hudson