Book Recommendations for OrCAD (10.3)

[[email protected]]

I am trying to learn OrCAD v 10.3, and am considering the following
text:

"Introduction to PSpice Using OrCAD for Circuits and Electronics",
Third Edition,
by Muhammad H. Rashid
Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (July 25, 2003)

Do you know if this book does a good job explaining how to use it
compared to other sources of information, or in terms of subject
approach? For example, have you picked it up and read it, and found it
helpful? Does it cover important features required get results, e.g.
how to add device specific spice models; running simulations with user
defined input signal sources, and so on?

Locally I haven't yet discovered a store that it in stock so I could
evaluate it beforehand. It does not appear to cover OrCAD 10.3 (June,
2004) based on the pub date.

Do you have book recommendations for learning this version (10.3) tool,
or would be a good general selection? Perhaps online tutorials would be
better (pointers?). Your comments appreciated.
Thanks

 

[[email protected]]

*Amusing footnote follow-up to this post. I checked Barnes and Nobels
online, which had the following review regarding text, "Introduction to
PSpice Using OrCAD for Circuits and Electronics" by Muhammad H. Rashid:

"A reviewer, December 17, 2003, 1 out of 5 stars
Not as advertised
The book is filled with examples using Microsim, not ORCAD. The author
must have had an old edition using Microsim and decided to publish
again. Therefore he quickly put out the same book with a title that
doesn't match. This book is useless for learning OrCAD."

All of this after seeing his credentials as stated from Amazon.com:
"Muhammad H. Rashid received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering
from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Birmingham, UK."

There are two additional lengthy paragraphs that follow discussing Dr.
Rashid's background. The contents address that Rashid is an
international scholar (holding professorship at six different
universities), examiner of technical papers in foreign sovereignties
and nations, technical consultant on contract proposals for
determination of award status and so on.

From this I naturally concluded that this book represented a

cornerstone work on the topic. ;-) Wow -- good thing I did not just
order online before investigating more thoroughly first! On the other
hand, I have yet to review it myself, so perhaps this review on bn.com
was misleading as well. Comments?
Bea

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Beagle,

Have you used other schematic capture programs in the past? SPICE programs?
Etc.?

If so, you can get along fine with OrCAD's own documentation. It is pretty
piss poor, IMO, but it does get the job done... most of the time.

If SPICE is what you're after, using Linear's LTSpice (aka SwitcherCAD III) is
probably a better place to go -- you'll get far more support from the Yahoo!
users group about it than you ever will get from Cadence about the basics of
how to get started.

 

[[email protected]]

Well, I took a quick look at Linear's LTSpice (aka SwitcherCAD III),
and it appears to be free, which is interesting. Thanks BTW. As time
goes by, I'll take second and third looks to try and see if it can
provide solutions that I'm after. I'm not big on Yahoo groups because I
think USENET holds the trump in that regard.

I have already committed a great deal of effort into OrCAD, and it
seems that it is a good selection of a tool in that it provides an
aweful lot of different functionalities to assist the designer. OTOH if
not for the fact that thousands of pages of documentation, means that
it takes some self-starter motivation, there would be no hope for
learning. AFAIK this is par for documentation esp for products that
represent mgmts decision to push it through the door. Rome wasn't built
in a day! Wolfram research and Mathematica being one of the few
exceptions -- absolutely splendid documentation for anyone with the
attention span to read it.

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Well, I took a quick look at Linear's LTSpice (aka SwitcherCAD III),
and it appears to be free, which is interesting. Thanks BTW.

Sure. For the price, it's a wonderful tool.

I'm not big on Yahoo groups because I
think USENET holds the trump in that regard.

Yeah, I agree, but unfortunately a lot of newer Internet users have never
heard of Usenet and hence Yahoo! has some groups that really don't have a
parallel on Usenet. (Google of course has their own "discussion groups" that
ARE Usenet-based, which is nice. Too bad Yahoo! had to go and "roll their
own...")

AFAIK this is par for documentation esp for products that
represent mgmts decision to push it through the door.

My impression (and this is for the 9.2 documentation, BTW) is that they
employed a bunch of writers who have very little or no experience actually
using schematic or PCB layout software to write the manuals. From afar,
everything is reasonably well organized and professional looking, but there
just isn't much "meat" in what's presented: There's a lot of repetition, and a
lot of somewhat circular explanations, e.g., "Cancel button: Pressing this
button cancels the dialog." Well, no duh... It really does come off as
someone doing their best to describe what happens when you invoke a particular
command, but really having no understanding of exactly why one might be
motivated to do so in the first place.

Years ago I used Protel for awhile and while the manuals from the company
themselves was quite good, someone had taken it upon himself to write his own
manual, which we purchased and which was even better. OrCAD could benefit
from similar treatment -- it would come out to about 1/4 the pages as well,
IMO.

Good luck!

---Joel Kolstad