Best cad for beginner

[Neale]

My son is an architect with an ability to visualise in 3D in a way that I could only dream about. I can bang out a quick sketch that roughly represents what I want to make, but I lack the ability to visualise all aspects of a complex design in sufficient detail to be able to produce all these sketches at the outset. And my pencil sketches tend not to be that intelligible the day after I've drawn them, and seldom survive very long in the workshop. Add these deficiencies to the fact that I have been known to make mistakes and I prefer to make them on a screen rather than the expensive chunk of Ecocast sitting on the mill table at the moment, and I accept that I am a poor runner-up to those who can go from mental image to finished, assembled, components with the help of no more than the back of a fag packet and a broken pencil.

Still, if the man who never made a mistake never made anything, I should have made quite a lot by now!

[Boyan Silyavski]

You need parametric if you are designing whatever machine, CNC including. Especially if you will repeatedly make something, but every time a bit different. Believe me, it was a great pain redesigning a machine i had in Sketchup to fit specific size working area .

I know only basic parametric modeling and am discovering how it looked difficult, but every next time it looks easier. Till the point I stopped sketching in Sketchup, where i am really very fast.
It really reminds me of the time in photography, when i was using all tools but not Photoshop. Then at the end i overcome my ignorance, went to a basic course and then learned it on a professional level. So it raised my photographic skill on a whole different level. So at the end i understood 1/2 is the photo and 1/2 is the development process/ Photoshop.

Back to the question. Obviously quality product like Fusion 360 will be preferred, cause there is a big name behind it. Cause i hate learning a program and then realizing its dead or its no good, or it has some ridiculous limit.