Book Recommendations for OrCAD (10.3)

I am trying to learn OrCAD v 10.3, and am considering the following
text:

"Introduction to PSpice Using OrCAD for Circuits and Electronics",
Third Edition,
by Muhammad H. Rashid
Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (July 25, 2003)

Do you know if this book does a good job explaining how to use it
compared to other sources of information, or in terms of subject
approach? For example, have you picked it up and read it, and found it
helpful? Does it cover important features required get results, e.g.
how to add device specific spice models; running simulations with user
defined input signal sources, and so on?

Locally I haven't yet discovered a store that it in stock so I could
evaluate it beforehand. It does not appear to cover OrCAD 10.3 (June,
2004) based on the pub date.

Do you have book recommendations for learning this version (10.3) tool,
or would be a good general selection? Perhaps online tutorials would be
better (pointers?). Your comments appreciated.
Thanks

 

*Amusing footnote follow-up to this post. I checked Barnes and Nobels
online, which had the following review regarding text, "Introduction to
PSpice Using OrCAD for Circuits and Electronics" by Muhammad H. Rashid:

"A reviewer, December 17, 2003, 1 out of 5 stars
Not as advertised
The book is filled with examples using Microsim, not ORCAD. The author
must have had an old edition using Microsim and decided to publish
again. Therefore he quickly put out the same book with a title that
doesn't match. This book is useless for learning OrCAD."

All of this after seeing his credentials as stated from Amazon.com:
"Muhammad H. Rashid received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering
from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Birmingham, UK."

There are two additional lengthy paragraphs that follow discussing Dr.
Rashid's background. The contents address that Rashid is an
international scholar (holding professorship at six different
universities), examiner of technical papers in foreign sovereignties
and nations, technical consultant on contract proposals for
determination of award status and so on.

From this I naturally concluded that this book represented a
cornerstone work on the topic. ;-) Wow -- good thing I did not just

order online before investigating more thoroughly first! On the other
hand, I have yet to review it myself, so perhaps this review on bn.com
was misleading as well. Comments?
Bea

 

Well, I took a quick look at Linear's LTSpice (aka SwitcherCAD III),
and it appears to be free, which is interesting. Thanks BTW. As time
goes by, I'll take second and third looks to try and see if it can
provide solutions that I'm after. I'm not big on Yahoo groups because I
think USENET holds the trump in that regard.

I have already committed a great deal of effort into OrCAD, and it
seems that it is a good selection of a tool in that it provides an
aweful lot of different functionalities to assist the designer. OTOH if
not for the fact that thousands of pages of documentation, means that
it takes some self-starter motivation, there would be no hope for
learning. AFAIK this is par for documentation esp for products that
represent mgmts decision to push it through the door. Rome wasn't built
in a day! Wolfram research and Mathematica being one of the few
exceptions -- absolutely splendid documentation for anyone with the
attention span to read it.