Customer Reviews

LabVIEW for Everyone: Graphical Programming Made Easy and Fun (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is not a book on how to do specific activities in LabVIEW such as signal processing. Instead it is a general usage book for anyone who anticipates needing LabVIEW regardless of the application. This book takes you from the very beginnings of using LabVIEW and includes making connections via GPIB, the user interface, creating virtual instruments (VI's) and subVI's via the user interface. The book then moves on to show how program constructs such as while loops, timed structures, strings, and arrays are also built into the interface. Next, the necessary business of data I/O is covered including file I/O, connecting your computer to the signals that are to be measured, and networking results. The final chapter covers enhancing your interface with such things as importing pictures, custom controls, and adding online help. This book is very accessible and makes heavy use of illustrations and screenshots of the application in particular so that the reader can follow along and be sure that he/she understands how to perform each action being described. Each chapter has various labs/activities that test the reader's understanding of how to perform various functions. After you finish this book, Gary Johnson's "LabVIEW Graphical Programming", which is a more detailed and intermediate book, might make more sense and therefore be advantageous.

I notice that the table of contents is not shown for this product, so I show that next:
Chapter 1. What in the World Is LabVIEW?
Chapter 2. Virtual Instrumentation: Hooking Your Computer Up to the Real World
Chapter 3. The LabVIEW Environment
Chapter 4. LabVIEW Foundations
Chapter 5. Yet More Foundations
Chapter 6. Controlling Program Execution with Structures
Chapter 7. LabVIEW's Composite Data: Arrays and Clusters
Chapter 8. LabVIEW's Exciting Visual Displays: Charts and Graphs
Chapter 9. Exploring Strings and File I/O
Chapter 10. Signal Measurement and Generation: Data Acquisition
Chapter 11. Data Acquisition in LabVIEW
Chapter 12. Instrument Control in LabVIEW
Chapter 13. Advanced LabVIEW Structures and Functions
Chapter 14. Advanced LabVIEW Data Concepts
Chapter 15. Advanced LabVIEW Features
Chapter 16. Connectivity in LabVIEW
Chapter 17. The Art of LabVIEW Programming
Appendix A. CD Contents
Appendix B. Add-on Toolkits for LabVIEW
Appendix C. Open Source Tools for LabVIEW: OpenG
Appendix D. LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming
Appendix E. Resources for LabVIEW

If you are a beginner to intermediate with LabVIEW, then the 3rd Edition is the single best book on LabVIEW available to you as of summer of 2007. If your budget only allows for one or a few books, put this one at the top of you list. I have read this book cover to cover, twice, and some sections in further detail as well as worked through all of the example code in detail.

I won't repeat the fine comments of others in their reviews. I speak from the perspective of 15+ years of working with LabVIEW, as a beginner in the early 1990s, a Certified LabVIEW instructor in the mid 90s, a small control and test system business founder and owner since the late 90s and an enthusiastic member of the LabVIEW community all during that time. I have bought most of the LabVIEW books that have ever been published as well as the (late) LTR newsletter and this 3rd Edition is the best book I have come across. If I were hiring someone new to do LabVIEW work, I'd give them a copy of this book first. The investment is a no brainer.

[A review of the 3rd EDITION 2006.]

There was once a time when you had to do data acquisition in a lab completely by hand. Hooking up ammeters and voltmeters, and then labouriously taking down measurements into a lab book. If you wanted a graph, well, take out graph paper and some pencils. Things are radically different nowadays, and Labview makes data acquisition relatively easy.

I say relatively, because the size of this book is a cautionary note. It is partly a reference manual, so that thankfully, you do not need to read most or all of it to do any useful data collection. But the book also functions as a teaching manual. Explaining in the early parts how to hook up a computer to instruments, often using the GPIB or serial port. Chapter 2 is this basic connection to the lab bench. It is very straightforward. It leads into later chapters, where the idea of block diagram programming in Labview is given. The block diagram approach is a modular one that is like applying a series of filters. Think of matrix algebra, if you have any background in that.

Once you realise that a lot of the book's size is due to many choices of built in functions (blocks), then Labview becomes a lot less formidable. Basically, once you can use Labview in some simple way, then applying more sophisticated functions is easy.

I've programmed in C, BASIC, and assembly in the past but I will never go back. I learned LV years ago with the first edition of this book and I love this software! One of my better decisions since now I make a living exclusively integrating hardware and writing code in LV. I plan on getting certifications after going through this edition. The style is engaging, light and straightforward. Even if you attend National Instruments formal training classes this book is a 'must have'. I always have it within reach at my desk.

I'm about halfway through a very detail oriented manual "LabVIEW for Everyone" and find it an amazing and easy learning resource. It provides linear training and examples, always building on previous exercises. You need to own a copy of the LabVIEW software or use the 30 day evaluation version. I highly recommend this book if you're trying to come up to speed with LabVIEW.

While there is a a lot of good information of the NI website, I thought buying a book would be helpful as I needed to learn LabView quickly. I thought this book was very helpful and would definately be a good book for someone new to LabView. My only wish is that it would have more converage on the DAQ part. To me this is not only the key part of LabView, it is the only part that got me confused (and still does) at some points. Some additional coverage would have helped.

LabVIEW stands for: Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench. Unlike traditional programming languages (Basic, C, C++, Java, etc.), where you have to write text instructions line by line, LabVIEW is a graphical programming language. Here you create a program using a graphical notation; in other words, you interconnect functional blocks (or icons) via wires, through which data flow. LabVIEW is specifically designed for data acquisition (DAQ), data analysis, and presentation of results.

If you have never worked with LabVIEW, you are like me. First you have to acquire the basic concepts. After that you will be able to read and fully understand more advanced LabVIEW books (at amazon.com you will find a lot of them).

LabVIEW for everyone give you those basic concepts. It has 981 pages divided into 17 chapters, 6 appendixes and 1 glossary. The fundamentals of LabVIEW are shown in the first 10 chapters. Advanced topics can be found in the last 7 chapters. There are plenty of illustrations (almost every page has at least one).

In this book authors explain, step-by-step, every pop-up menu, every pull-down menu, every functional block and its applications, etc. To follow those explanations, you just need to have the basic knowledge of your PC's operating system. There is an accompanying CD-ROM that includes a 30-day evaluation version of LabVIEW 8.0 for Windows, which allows you to practice all activities (exercises) found inside the book.

I purchased this book after reading the LabView 8 Student Edition book. Although the "LabView For Everyone" book covers much of the same material, I found the later to have more details and better explanations than the student version. I believe the "LabView for Everyone" is an essential volume for anyone who wishes to learn and use LabView for instrument control and simulation purposes.

I was introduced to LabView back in 1994, and was not a particular fan of the language, but after familiarizing myself with LabView Version 8, I'm quite impressed with the capabilities. What really motivated me to learn the LabView "data flow paradigm" was the incorporation of MATLAB scripts into the "G" language. Being a MATLAB power user, the combination of virtual instrumentation, data flow, and MATLAB is the winning combination for simulation and productivity.

The reason why I only gave it 4 stars is that neither the student version or the "LabView for Everyone" text covers the "Event Structure" in significant detail; thus making the reader experiment with this structure to gain operational insight. The "Event Structure" is very important since it represents a programming paradigm used by programmers familiar with the languages of Microsoft's Visual Studio such as C#, C++, Visual Basic, etc. I sincerely hope both Robert Bishop (author of the Student Edition) and Jeffrey Travis and Jim Kring (authors of LabView for Everyone) take this advice and augment the explanation of the "Event Structure" in later editions with more examples and discussion.

This book fills in the yawning gaps of LabVIEW 8.xx's documentation and ambiguous and dense "HELP" sections. For example, as a retread LabVIEW user from over a decade ago, I looked for a simple step-by-step procedure to turn on, write, a single digital line. Just to turn on and off a single LED. The LabVIEW HELP returned many dozens of topics and forced me to read many extraneous topics to come to the conclusion that I was not going to find any help. Then, I tried to use the "easy" virtual instruments already made for the occassion, but the only one found after navigating through a thicket of unrelated virtual instruments was one which wrote a digital port of eight channels and no explanation of how to set it up to write one digital line. LabVIEW for Everyone... solved my problem and a whole lot more. This book is needed by anyone who is not an experienced LabVIEW programmer and who does not have the time or resources to attend training classes and wants to get started as soon as possible. Travis and Kring have created a readable and effective reference source for LabVIEW programmers. It is possibly the only book which addresses recent LabVIEW 8.xx software and truly does make it easy and fun.

I am an engineering student and needed to learn how to collect data from a DC dyno and engine setup using NI products (two E-series cards and an scxi chassis w/ random cards). I wasted a lot of time trying to mess around with LabView (and failing) before buying this book. After reading about the basic graphical structures and following along with the data acquisition section, the system was working in no time.