While this book did cover 3D studio Max's Fundamentals, like the title says. It was unfortunately a pretty dry read. There were too many boring pages between actual tutorials, which were pretty good when they finally came along. They were, however, not explained very well in the book. The Lotus ScreenCams that came on the CD showing exactly how the author did something is the only thing that kept me from tossing this book in the trash during a frustrating tutorial.The biggest problem I had with this book is that too much of it read like a help file. The author walked through too many of the menu's and toolbars explaining what their function was. The help files will tell you the same thing.More tutorials "showing me how these menu's and toolbars are actually used in a 3DS project" would have made this a winner. Oh well. Maybe next edition.