Labview tutorials

[totheisland@hotmail.com]

We are considering Lab View but over the years have heard many
complaints about the steep learning curve. Has anyone produced
instructional tapes or computer based tutorials.

Thanks

[Eric Inazaki]

In article <3d433677.1790109@news-server.sport.rr.com>, totheisland@hotmail.com wrote:

> We are considering Lab View but over the years have heard many
> complaints about the steep learning curve. Has anyone produced
> instructional tapes or computer based tutorials.
>
> Thanks

Labview, steep? Compared to what, something you already know?
Personally, I could never get into demo tapes or canned tutorials.
Why not get a demo version of LV and play with it a bit using some
small projects? They have a demo and some of the Labview books
may come with demo or student versions.

eric

[totheisland@hotmail.com]

On Sat, 27 Jul 2002 20:35:23 -0500, Eric Inazaki
wrote:

>Labview, steep? Compared to what, something you already know?
>Personally, I could never get into demo tapes or canned tutorials.
>Why not get a demo version of LV and play with it a bit using some
>small projects? They have a demo and some of the Labview books
>may come with demo or student versions.
>
>eric
Let's see ... steep compared to DasyLab and Visual Basic for example.
I've used tutorial tapes several times with Microsoft products and
found them worth the investment. I've worked with LabView demo
distributions several times in the past never finding them very
intuitive or instructive. National recognizes the difficulty of
becoming proficient in LabView
and offers a series of hands on classes
to address this need. Attending an NI course would be inconvenient not
to mention expensive. Certainly there must be a market for a good
video tutorial series.

[mechatron]

these tutorials may help you:

http://www.mech.uwa.edu.au/jpt/tutorial/index.html

[storeyk]

National instruments offer a range of self-paced training (interactive CD's, course kits and training hardware). Details of these can be found at:

http://sine.ni.com/apps/we/nioc.vp?cid=2281〈=US

I learnt LabVIEW by going through an NI basics I course manual from cover to cover and found it very easy and useful. I then attended an NI basics II course and they skipped over most of the manual - i would have been better off buying the course manual and going through it myself! Although i would have missed out on the danish pastries at tea break and the shoddy hotel then.

Hopefully this helps..

Kim

[DougD]

As someone who has developed in LabVIEW, LabWindows, MSVC/C++, MSVB,
and Fortran, LabVIEW has the shallowest learning curve of all of them.
It basically amounts to flowcharting. If you have ever done ladder
logic for PLC's or can read schematics, flow-charts, or block
diagrams, then LabVIEW should be easy for you to learn.

Of course, there are many advanced topics in LabVIEW that require
extra effort to learn: ActiveX, TCP/IP, serial comm, mult-threading,
database, etc. In this way, it is like learning chess. Learning how
to move the pieces is easy. Becoming Bobby Fischer is much harder.

THIS IS TRUE OF ANY LANGUAGE THOUGH. In fact it is often a lot easier
to learn to use one of these advanced skills in LabVIEW first before
attempting it in another language.

The true story of how I learned LabVIEW...

I worked for a company in Atlanta back in 1994 doing field service,
some mechanical design, some VB and VB programming and the odd bit of
troubleshooting for them in a startup group that was doing video
conferencing.

Well this group ended up folding.

In December of 1995, my old boss from that company called me and
offered me a job on the condition that I could learn this new
programming language he had heard about for a new project that he was
working on. He told me I had three days to learn it if I wanted the
job.

Well, it took me only three HOURS just playing with the user's manual
to write some useful code with that language.

What was that language?

You guessed it... It was LabVIEW!

LabVIEW's biggest drawback is not the learning curve, it's the initial
cost. It starts at around 1500 dollars and goes up from there. From
a rapid application development (RAD) point of view though, this
initial cost is easily offset if you plan to do a lot of
instrumentation programming because it is generally quicker to develop
most small to medium scale projects in LabVIEW than in other
languages.

Douglas De Clue
LabVIEW developer
ddeclue@bellsouth.net







totheisland@hotmail.com wrote in message news:<3d433677.1790109@news-server.sport.rr.com>...
> We are considering Lab View but over the years have heard many
> complaints about the steep learning curve. Has anyone produced
> instructional tapes or computer based tutorials.
>
> Thanks

[Labviewguru]

Well, I don't know where you got your information, but unless someone thinks days is a steep curve, they are WAY out of wack on this.

I learned LabVIEW in a week, with no formal training. I owe part of that to Lisa Wells, for her book "LabVIEW for Everyone" and part also to National Instruments for their examples database. I sincerely wish that Visual C++ and Visual Basic had sample programs that came with it that were as helpful as the LabVIEW example programs were to me in learning LabVIEW.

If you are interested in LabVIEW, and you should be, there are a number of options for training:

"LabVIEW for Everyone" (second edition) by Jeffrey Travis.

LabVIEW Basics I and II either at NI, in your area, or if you have enough students, onsite. They also
have self paced CDs, as someone mentioned, they are far less expensive than the courses, but the CDs don't answer questions as well (I've tried, they won't respond...).

There are also a number of other options, such as classes in colleges, and custom training programs. I have personally taught LabVIEW, and was able to teach the basics to a couple of "hardened" engineers in only a few days.

LabVIEW should be your first choice for languages that are easy to use. Also, you have the benefit of being able to have programmers trained to create self-documenting code, which means the learning curve of the software through subsequent developers is a lot easier.

Good luck.

[tom]

Labviewguru wrote:

> Well, I don't know where you got your information, but unless someone
> thinks days is a steep curve, they are WAY out of wack on this.
>
> I learned LabVIEW in a week, with no formal training. I owe part of
> that to Lisa Wells, for her book "LabVIEW for Everyone" and part also
> to National Instruments for their examples database. I sincerely wish
> that Visual C++ and Visual Basic had sample programs that came with it
> that were as helpful as the LabVIEW example programs were to me in
> learning LabVIEW.
>
> If you are interested in LabVIEW, and you should be, there are a
> number of options for training:
>
> "LabVIEW for Everyone" (second edition) by Jeffrey Travis.
>
> LabVIEW Basics I and II either at NI, in your area, or if you ha
ve
> enough students, onsite. They also have self paced CDs, as someone
> mentioned, they are far less expensive than the courses, but the CDs
> don't answer questions as well (I've tried, they won't respond...).
>
> There are also a number of other options, such as classes in colleges,
> and custom training programs. I have personally taught LabVIEW, and
> was able to teach the basics to a couple of "hardened" engineers in
> only a few days.
>
> LabVIEW should be your first choice for languages that are easy to
> use. Also, you have the benefit of being able to have programmers
> trained to create self-documenting code, which means the learning
> curve of the software through subsequent developers is a lot easier.
>
> Good luck.

You will not find it difficult compared to C or C++. My only regret
is not using it years earlier than I did - I could have done so much!
Some things are a little tricky and take some thought but the basics
are not hard at all. Get stuck in!

Tom