Hmm, looks like my comment was a bit controversial ...

Quote Originally Posted by Rogue View Post
If by "slow and inefficient" you mean that the tutorials do not take the shortcuts you use, then you are missing the point...
That's not what I meant at all, in fact I don't use that many shortcuts - only the obvious ones. What I actually meant is that it takes a lot longer to attain the required information from a video compared to skimming through a document. In general I would get bored watching someone gradually explaining everything to find what I want. For a lot of things with these programs all you really need is a list of which buttons to press ... e.g Edit->arrange->Put to back. Since that's often included in help files or tutorials I just use one of my favourite shortcuts, Ctrl+F, to find them.

Clearly some videos don't fit my description, just as some help files are not so effective. I could count the number of software related videos I've watched on one hand, and before someone says you can count to 63 on one hand I'm not using binary.

Once you've used a few CAD/CAM programs they're all the same really and generally quite straightforward to pick up, as I indirectly demonstrated to luke11cnc last weekend.