Books

This page lists the books about FreeCAD we know of:

FreeCAD Beginner’s Starter Kit
By Aleksander Sadowski, published May 2023, ebook/paperback



FreeCAD is commonly known for its steep learning curve which stems from an overwhelming amount of possibilities available to the beginner. This book simplifies the use of FreeCAD for you by equipping you with an easy workflow, while giving context to the functions you need. You will learn to create fun projects, design helpful gadgets for your house or even get on an adventure and design your own products. This book strives to condense the knowledge from beginner courses into a tangible guide that anyone can pick up and learn how to create 3D designs with FreeCAD. You will overcome your frustration with breaking models or not knowing how to recover them and make you confident enough to be able to create your own designs from beginning to end - from the first idea to the 3D printable model.

You will learn the basic concepts of solid 3D modeling and how to apply those using FreeCAD. You will then build an entire project from scratch and turn an idea to individual 3D CAD parts with Part Design and Sketcher, assemble all parts digitally with A2Plus, prepare and export the 3D CAD models for 3D printing. You will also learn how to share your models using fcprint.

By the end of this book, you will be able to design your own little 3D printable gadgets that you have dreamt of and share those with your friends and the entire world.

https://www.packtpub.com/product/freecad-beginners-starter-kit/9781801810463

FreeCAD for Makers
By Jo Hinchliffe, published September 2022, free ebook



FreeCAD is the number one free software 3D design program, and this PDF guide is the best way to get started with it. We’ll take you from absolute beginnner to advanced user, going from the basics of drawing a line and making it 3D all the way to parametric design, importing objects from photographs, designing for sheet metal, and loads more.

Because FreeCAD is free software, its users can add to it, writing extensions to the software to suit their needs. These add-ons, known as workbenches, cover a range of uses, including PCB design, pipes, timber-framing, architectural design… the list of practical use cases goes on and on. So, whatever you’re interested in building, you’ll find a FreeCAD workbench for it.

https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad

FreeCAD for architectural drawing
By Allan Brito, published August 2020, ebook/paperback



Do you want to start using a free and open-source software to work in your CAD related projects? Meet FreeCAD and their incredible array of options to create both technical drawings and 3D models for architecture, engineering, and more.

In this book, you will learn how to use FreeCAD to create traditional technical drawings for architecture. As an example of project development, you will learn how to draw a full featured floor plan using FreeCAD. We will add to that floor plan all traditional elements from an architectural drawing like furniture, dimension lines, text annotations, and much more.

In the final chapters, we can take this floor plan design and export it using either the DXF format or as a PDF. You will be able to add the floor plan to page layout for print featuring a title block from a template in FreeCAD.

You don't need any previous experiences with FreeCAD, since we will start from the beginning. From the user interface basics to drawing a floor plan!

https://www.blender3darchitect.com/freecad-for-architectural-drawing/

FreeCAD for Inventors
By Brad Collette, published September 2018, ebook/paperback



This book introduces novice and intermediate users to the most frequently used tools and techniques in FreeCAD. Part one introduces new users to FreeCAD concepts and User Interface. Part two teaches various modeling techniques with a handful of examples. Part three uses the examples to explore FreeCAD's ability to generate: Technical Drawings, Gcode for CNC machines, Ray-traced images and more.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=30959

FreeCAD How-to
By Daniel Falck, Brad Collette, published September 2012, ebook/paperback



FreeCAD is a general purpose platform for CAD development. It can be extended to use different workbenches to solve different problems. Targeted squarely at the engineering community, FreeCAD is an open source design application built to be extended. Python, the powerful scripting language, is woven deeply into FreeCAD’s DNA and gives users unprecedented power to automate and invent.

"FreeCAD [How-to]" is a lean, fast tour of FreeCAD's major workbenches and design philosophy. The reader will get a hands-on introduction to several modeling techniques and learn how Python makes macro automation and design possible.

FreeCAD allows users to design in a variety of ways; from drawing 2D designs as lines and circles to combining primitive solids into complex 3D shapes. Objects can even be created or modified by code you write in Python. FreeCAD even allows power users to extend the application itself with new dialogs, panels, and scripts. This book will not only show you how to get started using FreeCAD in a traditional GUI mode, but will teach you how to harness its powerful scripting language for more power.

https://www.packtpub.com/product/freecad/9781849518864