LabVIEW for Everyone: Graphical Programming Made Easy and Fun

  Title: LabVIEW for Everyone: Graphical Programming Made Easy and Fun

  Authors: Jeffrey Travis, Jim Kring

  Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 3 edition

  Hardcove: 430 pages

  Pubdate: 27 July 2007

  ISBN: 0131856723

Book Review

LabVIEW for Everyone will help you get LabVIEW up and running quickly and easily, and will start you down the road to becoming an expert LabVIEW developer. The book offers additional examples and activities to demonstrate techniques, identifies other sources of information about LabVIEW, and features descriptions of cool LabVIEW applications. You are invited to open, inspect, use, and modify any of the programs on the accompanying CD-ROM. The CD-ROM also includes the 30-day evaluation version of LabVIEW 8.0 for Windows, which allows you to do just about everything the commercial version does during the evaluation period. You can also always get the latest evaluation version of LabVIEW at http://ni.com/labview

This book expects you to have basic knowledge of your computer's operating system. If you don't have much computer experience, you may want to spend a little time with your operating system manual and familiarize yourself with your computer. For example, you should know how to access menus, open and save files, make backup disks, and use a mouse. It also helps if you have some basic programming experience with other languages (C, Java, FORTRAN, etc.), but it is not necessary to know another programming language to use LabVIEW.

After reading this book and working through the exercises, you should be able to do the following, and much more, with the greatest of ease:

• Write LabVIEW programs, called virtual instruments, or VIs

• Employ various debugging techniques

• Manipulate both built-in LabVIEW functions and VIs

• Create and save your own VIs so that you can use them as subVls, or subroutines

• Design custom graphical user interfaces (GUIs)

• Save your data in a file and display it on a graph or chart

• Build applications that use General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) or serial instruments

• Create applications that use plug-in DAQ boards

• Use built-in analysis functions to process your data

• Optimize the speed and performance of your LabVIEW programs

• Employ advanced techniques such as state machines and event structures.

• Control your VIs and publish your data over the Internet or on the Web, using LabVIEW's features like its built-in Web server and remote panels

• Use LabVIEW to create your instrumentation applications

LabVIEW for Everyone helps you get started quickly with LabVIEW to develop your instrumentation and analysis applications. The book is divided into two main sections: Fundamentals and Advanced Topics.

The Fundamentals section contains nine chapters and teaches you the fundamentals of programming in LabVIEW. The Advanced Topics section contains eight chapters that further develop your skills and introduce helpful techniques and optimizing strategies. We suggest that you work through the beginning section to master the basics; then, if you're short on time, skip around to what you really want to learn in the advanced section.

In both sections, chapters have a special structure to facilitate learning, as follows:

• Overview, goals, and key terms describe the main ideas covered in that chapter

• The main sections are a discussion of the featured topics

• Activities reinforce the information presented in the discussion

• Wrap It Up ! summarizes important concepts and skills taught in the chapter

• Additional activities in many chapters give you more practice with the new material

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