Welcome to Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012 Essentials, based on the Revit Architecture 2012 release.

What you are holding in your hands is the first Revit book in a new series. When we authors first sat down to learn Revit (eons ago), each of us was put into a room with a trainer, and over the course of four days, we clicked through all the buttons and functionality to learn the software. Once initiated, we walked away with some answers, some questions, and a general understanding of what Revit does and how we could use it to leverage building design, documentation, and construction.

Our aim with this book is to replicate that training experience. The book is divided into training “days” with the idea that each chapter should take you a couple of hours to complete and four chapters equal a full day of training. Once you’ve made it through the book, in the final two chapters we offer a half day’s worth of tips and tricks to help you leverage those skills on real projects.

When we sat down to plan this book, we looked to serve the needs of individuals who were fresh to Revit as well as those who had taken training so long ago they needed a solid refresher. We hope you will find that our efforts to meet that need were successful. We designed the book in a nonlinear fashion with the intention that the chapters would be freestanding, so the reader could take almost any chapter and learn its topics rather than having to work through the book from beginning to end.

We wanted to write a book that is as much about architectural design and practice as it is about software. Architecture is a way of looking at the world and the methods that inspire creatively solving the problems of the built world. The book follows real-life workflows and scenarios and is full of practical examples that explain how to leverage the tools within Revit. We hope you’ll agree that we’ve succeeded.