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by gdelfino01 1232 days ago
What path did you take to learn it? YouTube?
2 comments

To chime in with my own learning experience so far.

I've done the standard: Google "freecad tutorial", click open a bunch of likely-looking result tabs, and have a quick browse to locate quality. From youtube, to written and illustrated guides, etc.

It's not difficult to find useful instruction. But the overall pool of easily-searchable knowledge suffers from that standard internet Time Fragmentation effect : that is, within months and years of publication, most of it is out of date by anywhere ranging from A Little to A Lot; a degree which is only determinable to the casual reader through trial-and-error. So a certain degree of inefficiency and double-work is near guaranteed.

I think I watched a couple of videos - really just to get going from the "How do I make a block that looks like this?" I didn't initially understand the idea of workbenches so just having someone say "Do this here" helped. A recent example of using a video to help me understand was how to generate a bevel gear.

After that, I would run into questions and google searches tend to help a lot. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to cut a hole in a curved surface and found a forum thread that suggested a good solution. (That solution felt a little weird from a design standpoint, but it worked, and the history was maintainable.)

Searchable forums are tremendously useful for software packages at this level.