Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual offers a hands-on tour of the program, with crystal-clear instructions for using every feature and lots of real-world examples to help you pick up the practical skills you need. Learn to use the basic tools, build and animate models, and place your objects in Google Earth. With this book, you will:

• Learn your way around the SketchUp workspace, and explore the differences between working in 2-D and 3-D
• Build simple 3-D shapes, save them as reusable components, and use SketchUp’s Outliner to show or hide them as you work
• Tackle a complicated model building with lots of detail, and discover timesaving tools for using many components
• Animate the model by creating an interior walkthrough of your building
• Dress up your model with realistic material shading and shadows, and place it in Google Earth

It’s easy to get started. Just download the program from Google.com, and follow the instructions in this book. You’ll become a SketchUp master in a jiffy.

Price: $34.99

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Price: $78.67

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Whether you need to learn 3D modeling for business or you’re just eager to see what you can create, Google SketchUp and Google SketchUp 8 For Dummies are for you. Available in both a free hobbyist version and a full-featured professional version, SketchUp explodes the myth that 3D modeling software must be complicated to learn and use. This book will take you step by step through downloading and using both versions on both Mac and Windows. There are even video walkthroughs on the companion Web site.

• Google’s exciting 3D modeling software offers hobbyists as well as architects, engineers, and industrial designers a less complicated tool for architectural rendering, urban planning, set design, game design, and other uses
• This guide explains both the free and professional versions for both Windows and Mac
• Covers the basic concepts of 3D modeling and how to build a 3D model, print or share your work online, export your drawing to another design package or Google Earth, and create a detailed set of plans
• Companion Web site features video walkthroughs

Google SketchUp 8 For Dummies gets you up and running with 3D modeling quickly and easily.

Price: $29.99

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There’s strange and then there’s Google strange. People turn to Google to ask the questions they don’t dare ask anyone else. This collection of unbelievable Google searches reveals the bizarre, ill-informed, and sometimes sick nature of everyday people. Whether it’s researching how to manually force poop out of their body or wondering if jail is really that bad, this book proves that the truth really is stranger than fiction.

Price: $10.95

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A bold and vital book that asks and answers the most urgent question of today: What Would Google Do?

In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google—the fastest-growing company in history—to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era.

Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book’s central question.

The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It’s about you.

Price: $26.99

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Sams Teach Yourself Google SketchUp 8 in 10 Minutes

Steven Holzner

Sams Teach Yourself Google SketchUp 8 in 10 Minutes gives you straightforward, practical answers when you need fast results. By working through its 10-minute lessons you’ll learn all you need to use Google’s free SketchUp 8 to create pro-quality 3D models of practically anything!

Tips point out shortcuts and solutions

Cautions help you avoid common pitfalls

Notes provide additional information

10 minutes is all you need to learn how to…

• Quickly get up and running with SketchUp 8
• Draw basic figures with the Rectangle, Circle, Polygon, and Arc tools
• Create freehand drawings of any shape
• Incorporate text into your models–even 3D text
• Convert 2D models to 3D using Push/Pull, Move, Rotate, and other tools
• Control your view of 3D objects with Orbit, Pan, and Zoom
• Accurately measure lengths and angles
• Create construction guides with Tape Measure, Dimensioning, and the Protractor
• Organize your models into components and groups
• Paint SketchUp objects in realistic colors
• Scale your models simply by dragging your mouse
• Use the innovative Follow-Me tool to quickly create complex 3D models
• Instantly repeat edges and surfaces at offsets from the original
• Draw cross-sections through any surface

Category:  Graphics & Design

Covers: Google SketchUp 8 Free Edition

User Level:  Beginning

Price: $14.99

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