Hey,

I'm working with LabVIEW since June.
According to this I have many questions

At first I visited a training from NI. It was the Basic Training. But this training didn't deal with every topic. So i have to learn all by myself.
How do you start?

It's new for me, before I programmed with Lotus Notes Domino and HTML.
But everyone said it's easy to learn.

Can you recommend some books or websites? (I can't login to the developer zone on the ni site...it switches everytime between "ghost" and my username... so I'm very happy I had find LAVA!)

LabVIEW has many built in examples - check out "Help> Find Examples" in the LabVIEW IDE.

In terms of programming patterns, I would recommend Conway and Watts, "A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW" ISBN:0130093653.

You may want to look at old presentations from the the LAVA user groups (that's where I found a reference to the above book - from a presentation given by some guy named Michael Aivaliotis).

A good book I used in College was entitled "LabVIEW for Everyone". I'm sure there are better books out there now.

But, just like you, I had some basics courses and learned the rest on my own. I feel that this is a very beneficial way of learning LabVIEW, however it often leaves 'gaps' in LabVIEW knowledge if your self-teaching doesn't lead you down all of the possible patchs.

My first LV-experience was a (small) programm I first programmed the way I thought it was right and then let it corrected by an expert. An expert can either be an external consultant or a NI employee (my case).

I also recommend to take the Basics / Intermediate courses to learn the way LabVIEW is built and how one should read/write the programs.

I also introduced a fewpeople since then with this method:
1. Basics courses from NI
2. Assign the "newbie" a Project
3. let him program
4. review with him his code and giving advises
5. repeat steps 2 to 4 with other projects

I also highly recommend the LTR (http://ltrpub.com/) articles "Ruloes to Wire By" on Volume 7, Number 1 and 2. ...as well as all the other articles.

I use the book "LabVIEW Graphical Programming" from Gary W. Johnson and Richard Jennings, 770 pages, ISBN 0-07-137001-3, McGraw-Hill

Didier

This is nice, but in our company i'll be the first who is working with LV.

I'm pretty new to LabVIEW, and I find that they have excellent examples. One of the first books that I really liked is "LabVIEW for Everyone," it gets you started right away. The other book I like is Gary Johnson's book, I have the 2nd edition. I find Gary covers alot of the topics in detail, and to me it is a really good reference book. My philosophy in learning is that you must learn the basics "LabVIEW for Everyone," and then learn the more advance topics.

Vince

Oh tell me about it i am an intern hired in a company and NOBODY here knows labview. i don't know that much, all i know some simple stuff, trying to learn everything myself.
actually i was thinking about taking the Ni intermediate class. how are their classes? are they helpful?worth the money?

Some people find the classes useful, some don't. I found them useful because they helped 'solidfy' my own self taught efforts, and I got to learn about all the 'short cuts'. Also, I found that once I learned about the state machine and started using it extensivly, then everything was much simpler after that.

Trying and trying is a great way of learning, because there is where theory and reality clashes. Don't be afraid of crashing your computer. Also, your mind start to adapt to the concepts and paradigm that surrounds LabVIEW.

Other thing I found very useful is by keeping in touch with forums like this one. Others are Info-LabVIEW, Developers Exchange, OpenG, etc. You learn big time.

I would agree with everything JohnRH said. The courses are esp. useful after you have walked through the online tutorials yourself. It helps to piece everything together. I found that the best things about the courses are:

1) By going to the course, you actually make time to learn the language. You have the time alloted without interruptions, phone calls, emails, meetings, etc. It is amazing how productive you can be in that kind of environment. I've found this to be true of most of all the (even non programming) training courses that I have taken.

2) Having an expert user there to help get through trivial problems that keep you from moving forward. Examples include wiring the wrong connectors, or not initializing variables. In a course, learning these lessons is more efficient.

3) Having equipment. When I first learned LabVIEW on my own, I didn't yet have a DAQ board for use on the machine where I was learning. It made it harder without being able to play with real data.

Among the other people I've seen take the classes, the best results are for those who have some understanding, however remote and vague, of programming, and have played with LabVIEW a little bit. The instructor is a big help if the person has never programmed before, but they're not going to make an ace programmer out of someone in 1 week. The courses do cost significant $$$, which is tough for a small shop but a normal thing for larger corporations with training budgets, etc. I've known a few guys who really didn't need to go... those guys were very smart, and could pick it up on their own.

This post has been edited by rk4th: Aug 26 2004, 09:36 PM

It could be worse... Your boss could know labview -- BADLY.

It's going to be a hard slog to learn how to program in Labview yourself. But, at least you won't be handed a pile of legacy code that is non-documented, opaque, and depends on wierd side effects of barely documented features. You have a fresh slate !!!!

How did you find this old thread?