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control (NC) programming because it gives a very thorough exposition of APT programming in both two and three dimensions and also it explains the inner workings of APT to a greater extent than other books.It is an advanced book on part programming, containing important material that is not available in the many introductory books that have been published on the subject in the past.This book will be of interest to manufacturing engineers, advanced part programmers, and post processor developers.There are problems at the end of the chapters that would be suitable for students in an engineering course at the senior/grad level, making this a very good engineering school text as well as a reference for practitioners.However, the book does not cover NC hardware at all.Part one consists of chapters 1 and 2, which give a brief overview of NC technology and then describes manual NC programming, defining coordinate systems, block formats, and function codes for NC machines.Part two consists of chapters 3 thru 8, these chapters describe the APT programming language in great detail.Chapter 4 describes the geometric entities used in APT, and the explanations of the more complicated geometric definitions such as ruled surface and tabulated cylinder are very well done.Chapter 5 describes the definition of cutter contouring motion with many examples and diagrams of both 2 and 3 dimensional cutter motion.Chapter 6 describes machining specifications and miscellaneous statements such as tolerancing specifications and the tool statement.There is even a section on the effect of the cutter top surface on the cutter path, this topic is rarely covered in text books and is often the source of major programming difficulties.Chapter 7 covers loop programming, subprogramming, and coordinate system transformations.These powerful techniques are covered in detail.Chapter 8 covers the procedures for running an APT program, describing the structure and program flow thru the five major sections of APT.There are programming problems at the end of this chapter on cutting gear teeth and pump impellers.Part three, consisting of chapters 9 and 10, covers the creation of NC Programs with CAD systems.In chapter 9 some of the mathematical methods for generating contouring motion are described.Also, some of the basic requirements for cutter motion are enumerated.Chapter 10 describes the NC capabilities of IBM's CADAM system.Part four, chapters 11 thru 15, is about the design and implementation of postprocessors.This information is usually only available in reference manuals for specific computer systems.The APT CLFILE (center line file) is described in detail and the DAPP method of producing postprocessors is covered.This is material for specialists, but it is good to see it explained in a textbook because the computer reference manuals are terse and difficult to understand.APT is a very mature and powerful software, and the many elementary books on APT that exist do not do justice to it.
Klemmer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.