Good book for CLD exam

[tbress]

Thanks to all of you for your interest in the book!  An early copy of the book was delivered to me last week from the printer, so it should be available online soon.  I will be attending NI Week this year and I know that we will have copies of the book for sale at the NTS Press exhibit.  I will be spending time at that table so if you are coming to NI Week, stop by and say hello.

I'm not sure when the book will be available on Amazon, soon, I hope!  I'll check with the publisher and post here when I get any updates.  You should also be able to order the book through the NTS Press website here:

http://www.ntspress.com/publications/effective-labview-programming/

[Clay_Pryor]

I picked up a copy of this book at NI Week and since then have read all of the instructional chapters but have not yet had a chance to work through the exercises.  As a software developer with over 30 years of experience in text based programming languages who is new to LabVIEW I find it an extremely valuable "quick start" guide to programming in LabVIEW.  I passed the CLAD at NI Week and plan to heavily use this book in my preparation for the CLD exam.

[mechqueen]

Hi,

I've been using your "Effective LabVIEW Programming" book to study but am still having trouble with transition diagrams. The ntspress website does not have any examples from the problems given in the book. It would be nice to be able to compare my solution to one that the author suggests. Are there any plans to post these state transition diagrams on your website?

Thanks,

Melissa

[tbress]

Hello, Melissa.  The state transition diagrams in the book are simply image files that I generated using a free program called UMLet.  I don't believe that they are downloadable from the book website, but all of the CLD projects used in the chapters and in the exercises have state transition diagrams shown in the book.

Chapter 2 of the book shows two state transition diagrams for the car wash controlller on pages 66 and 67.  A state transition diagram for the Multitest VI is on page 63. A state transition diagram for the DAQ Multitest VI is shown in Figure 15.4 on page 213.

The rest of the state transition diagrams are assigned as exercises in Problem Set 1, Problem Set 6 and Problem Set 7.  You can find the diagrams in the solutions:

• Traffic Light in Figure G.1 on page 470
• Security System in Figures G.6 and G.7 on page 473
• Boiler in Figure G.13 on page 477
• Car Wash 2 in Figure G.33 on page 489
• Sprinkler in Figure L.1 on page 556
• ATM in Figure M.1 on page 571

Keep in mind that state transition diagrams can vary depending on the level of abstraction you use.  They can be very detailed or very general depending on your style and how they are to be used.  So don't worry if your diagrams don't match the ones in the book.  The main idea is for the diagram to be useful to you in determiing the states that you need and how they transition from one to the other.  Hope that helps!

[mechqueen]

Oh, yes..that helps a lot! Thank you. Great book. I like that there are so many LabVIEW examples and program excercises.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

I just wanted to let you guys now that there is an excellent interview with Tom Bress, author of the "Effective LabVIEW Programming", listen at:

http://vishots.com/effective-labview-programming-new-book-by-thomas-bress-helps-you-pass-your-cld/

[SeanDonner]

I really applaud you for taking the time to create a book with the intermediate LabVIEW developer in mind.  Other than some of the topics already hit upon, my biggest critisism (purely based on a 2 minute scan through the beginning of chapter 4 is that this book could do well to be reviewed, and edited, by a technical writer.  When the subject is technical in nature it's very easy to create paragraphs that are dry and don't really keep the reader engaged and it takes a real craftsman with many technical books under their belt to massage dry verbage into sentences that are both conversational while still chalk full of usefull knowledge.

Again, I've only slightly skimmed a few pages of chapter 4, but if you look at just about every sentence on page 90 it reads like an appliance user manual where it's just short sentence after short sentence of facts, not engaging at all.  The 2nd paragraph of 4.1 really exemplifies this non-conversational, fact-based writing as I can transform just about every sentence into a bulleted list verbatim and it actually reads just as clear, if not clearer:

• The states are represented by individual cases in a case structure
• Each case contains all of the code needed to execute the functions of its state
• The case structure is placed within a loop, driving the VI fromone state to another.
• Each state decides which state to move to next
• ...

I wholehearted acknowledge that I'm taking a very small part of a very large book and making a blanket assuption about the whole book.  However, whenever there is smoke there is fire and I'm going to guess chapter 4 is not the only place where one can find examples of what I will call dry, fact-based verbage.  You did an excellent job of putting all the pertient information on paper, it just needs to be massaged, prefereably by a seasoned technical writer, to become engaging.  To put it another way, if I had to grade this book using CLD criteria, you would get near perfect marks on functionality but a fairly low score on style.  

I definitely don't want to take away from the hundreds of hours of dedication im sure it took to put this book together, I've never written a book personally but my father has (on Blackjack) and I've seen what it entails.  Kudos to you.