During my downtime (read unemployment period), I have been self-studying with Revit Architecture and Revit MEP. While looking at resources for each, I have come to the conclusion that Revit MEP is still a vast untapped resource.
If you jump on Amazon and do a search of Revit Architecture, it will yield a result of 297 books. Granted some of these are older versions, but the fact remains there are lots of them out there. Now do the same for Revit MEP and you get a result of 78 books.
Narrowing that down to the latest versions (2012) and just looking at page one of the Amazon site, you get the following Revit Architecture 2012 books:
- Revit Architecture 2012: No Experience Required
- Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012
- Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012 Essentials
- The Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit Architecture 2012
- Introducing Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012
- Residential Design using Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012
- Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012 for Architects and Designers
- Commercial Design using Revit Architecture 2012
- Revit Architecture 2012 Basics: from the Ground Up
And on the MEP side, here are the offerings:
- Mastering Autodesk Revit MEP 2012
- The Aubin Academy Master Series: Revit MEP 2012
That’s it, folks! Two books! The list is just taken form the first page of Amazon; there may be other books out there, but they are hiding pretty well for me.
Even the famed Autodesk University speakers forums were pretty much slanted towards Architecture over MEP. 88 for Revit architecture vs. 41 for Revit MEP. Actually, that last one surprised me a bit. I’ll have to dig through those in my never-ending quench for learning.
My point is that Revit MEP is still an untapped resource. Out of all the books mentioned above for Architecture, 4 of them deal with ME the beginner. And Out of the MEP, 0 (that ZERO, ZILCHO) deal with beginner users there. Granted, that Revit Architecture has been out longer, and there are many closet architectural-type people out there. Not many WANT to admit that they are MEP-types. Well, I AM AN MEP Person! 🙂
Is there a market for more books that deal with beginning MEP? This blogger/author very much thinks so.
The Revit Convert 
January 6th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
There is another MEP focused book called Design Intergration by Daniel Stine (Schroff), so three woot!
Consider that RAC is a little over 11 years old while RME is only 5 years old (RST is one year older). Not too surprising that RAC has more published work. RME’s first two releases didn’t see much adoption. It wasn’t until the 2010 release that firms started sinking their teeth in seriously.
That means there weren’t many experts available or more importantly confident and interested in writing books. There are a lot of training options besides books, training companies/consultants, online training, video curriculum companies, as well as web resources like user group forums, blogs and videos.
For the motivated learning there is a wealth of options, something for every kind of learner.
January 6th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Thanks for the information, Steve. Yeah, I knew that RAC had more life, but was sort of shocked at the lack of books and wanted to target this from a point that there is room for more authors.
If you can elaborate more on the other sources available to RME, I for one would appreciate it
Keeping in mind that I have been using Revit now for about a month, I know that there is lots more to learn, so I’m looking for any and all help. I found the YouTube training videos to be pretty good. The Mastering book is okay, but for a newbie such as I, it is not a casual read. 🙂