Book excerpt: The objective of this tutorial book is to expose the reader to the basic FEA capabilities in CATIA V5 Release 21. The chapters are designed to be independent of each other allowing the user to pick specific topics without the need to go through the previous chapters. However, the best strategy to learn is to sequentially cover the chapters. In this workbook, the parts created in CATIA are simple enough they can be modeled with minimal knowledge of this powerful software. The reason behind the simplicity is not to burden the reader with the CAD aspects of the package. However, it is assumed that the user is familiar with CATIA V5 Release 21 interface and basic utilities such as pan, zoom, and rotation. The tutorials are based on release 21; however, other releases can also be used with minor changes. Typically, the differences are not even noticed by a beginner.