The purpose of this book is to describe the basic principles, methods, and tools of computer applications for design tasks. It contains chapters on the basic components of CAD, the design process and its application to CAD, the architecture of CAD systems, CAD implementation, the engineering methods of CAD, and CAD data transfer. The book provides a good overview of CAD-related subjects. The book is completely descriptive, and relatively easy although quite monotonous reading. The bibliography is reasonable, although somewhat outdated. The subject index is detailed and comprehensive and makes it easy to find specific topics in the book. The book provides a good overview of the topic, but some previous knowledge of the field is required in order to benefit from reading it. It would not serve well as a textbook.

This second edition of the book contains a number of new topics. The discussion of implementation methodology covers hardware, system architecture, and system and application interfaces. The authors provide a mathematical description of curves and surfaces, and discuss CAD data transfer. They also give a number of interesting new application examples.