learn me: learning CAD programming

there's gotta be someone out there that can help me with this..

I'm trying to teach myself how to operate the CAD nesting software for the laser here at work. it's frustrating the hell outta me- the clicks on the mouse don't always do the same thing twice in a row.. anyways, is anyone out there familar with the Striker 2011 nesting software? the company doesn't want to spend the money to properly teach me, and they think i can figure it out on my own by just playing with it for a couple of hours every night.. the other guy that uses this software works days and our hours rarely overlap...

this software runs on the Autocad framework, so can anyone tell me any good basic shortcuts or direct me to somewhere online with good instructions/tutorials for this.. the videos on the Striker website are all but worthless for someone with zero CADbackground like myself.

then once i figure this out, i get to move on to teaching myself how to run a Trumpf laser that was made in 1997 and is far less intuitive than the newer Amadas that were at the last place where i did the laser thing..

as far as Autocad, run the options command (just type options and hit enter), user preferences tab, right-click customization...

now if someone else is using this same software, you may not want to go changing options, but at least you can have an idea of what the right click button is doing and when. you might want to poke around through the rest of the options too just to see how things are currently set for the software, it might just give you a basic idea.

There are so many customization options, I like the way my workstation is set up, and I find some of my co-workers settings to be completely unusable and I want to throw myself in front of a bus if I have to use their computer for more than a few minutes.

Im sorry if it doesnt help much but I dont really have any answers to the rest of your questions!

I like the right click to bring up a menu rather than 'hitting enter again'.

I bought a cheap paperback book about AutoCAD when I came to my current job. It helped with learning the basics of drafting with cad. I would send it to you, but I gave it away.

I've never learned autocad, it always felt clunky to me. I'm sure if I spent time with it, it would be fine. I absolutely LOVE SolidWorks. It's like a big interactive geometry game that results in something real. I've never figured out how or why people do complex geometry in SketchUp. It's great for basic stuff or sketching models. Perhaps if I investigated the available plugins, there would be more reason to use it.

I used to work for Amada myself. Unfortunately, the only automated nesting I ever used was in Metamation's Alfacam.

We took to doing the nesting by hand for a lot of parts that we cut repeatedly at a model job shop that we used to test out new techniques in a "sort of real world" environment, as we often had some tricks we could use to shave off cycle time that would work in a lab environment but pushed things too hard to be used for production. One thing we'd found out was that there were ways to make common line cutting WAY more reliable by making sure the cuts were sequenced in such a way that the cutting head never was allowed to pass near a part that was already free of the sheet, but at the time, there wasn't a CAD/CAM program on earth that could correctly implement the heuristics needed. We had to redraw the parts with the common lines placed manually and set up the cutting sequence by hand. The software would always get it wrong.

It's possible some of the lessons from that shop were incorporated into later CAD/CAM programs, but if they were, it was after I left the company. And I don't have any experience with Striker, sorry.