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Book Recommendations for OrCAD (10.3)

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

Reply to
beagle197
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*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.

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

Reply to
beagle197

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.

Reply to
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. 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.

Reply to
beagle197

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

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...")

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

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

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