Anyone interested in working on a LabVIEW book with me?

[mjsowa]

Hello

Several months back I began working on a LabVIEW training manual and
after becoming busy with other things, progress has stalled out. I am about
70 pages into it.

Here is what I have so far.

Chapter 1 - Introduction (could probably use a little more work)
Chapter 2 - Number Types
Chapter 3 - Strings
Chapter 4 - Booleans
Chapter 5 - Arrays
Chapter 6 - Structures (about 75% done)
Chapter 7 - File I/O (havnt started)

I envisioned this much as an introductory manual for someone who has never
used LabVIEW before. I have my own business in which one of the things I
had hoped to offer was LabVIEW training and thought that it would be more
cost effective if I could produce my own training manual than have potential
students buy a 3rd party book.

I'm not sure what to do now with what I have but these are my ideas.
1) Finish and polish what I have outlined above myself and see if I can sell
individual copies. I think that this would be appropriate for college
courses
using LabVIEW with a need to quickly teach LabVIEW newbies enough
to create vis for small experiments. Perhaps tailoring custom chapters to
show
how to use the classes particular hardware.

2) Find one or two people interested in working with me to make something
considerably more substantial, getting into advanced programming concepts
and
hardware programming concepts. This would continue to be a commercial
project.

3) Turn what I have so far into an open project. Divvy up the chapters and
subchapters
to individuals to really hammer out into something nice. This has a lot of
appeal for
a lot of reasons. I dont think it would be too difficult with the effort of
10-15 people
working a couple hours a week to produce a free document that is better than
all
the books currently on the market.

What do you say? Anyone interested in working on this project with me? I
think it
would be a great service to the community.

Send me e-mail or respond to this thread so I can get an idea of the level
of interest.
Make sure you let me know your LabVIEW background and what sections you
would be interested in working on. Suggestions for future chapters are
welcome, too.
(State Machines, Interface Nodes, GPIB, VXI, etc.)

Mark


--
Mark J. Sowa, Ph.D.
marksowa@one.net
Strigidae Technologies, Inc.
w3.one.net/~marksowa
P.O. Box 531251
Cincinnati, OH 45253
Voice: (513) 259-9682
Fax: (513) 598-4203

[CraigGraham]

I'm willing. 5 years experience doing GPIB and card-based DAQ along with
playing with niceties like ActiveX, both for external app control and to
expand the available selection of front panel controls. Reasonable amount of
time at the moment though I'm looking for a new job [anyone hiring? 🙂 ] so
that may change.

A commercial book that gets published is better on the CV than a free one so
I favour working towards the former and doing it as a comprehensive work
that goes into depth. But at the order of 1k pages it's a formidable task.
Publication indicates a publisher thinks it's worthwhile; producing a free
book is an indication only of lots of free time to most people 🙂


Mark Sowa wrote in message
news:tsjvp3q0qjp34c@corp.supernews.com..
.

> 2) Find one or two people interested in working with me to make something
> considerably more substantial, getting into advanced programming concepts
> and
> hardware programming concepts. This would continue to be a commercial
> project.

ActiveX could be the basis of two chapters- "how/why to do it" and a
reference to the common apps and controls. The latter however is essentially
a reference to a load of M$ products and M$ may protest. There's a
continuous trickle of ActiveX messages online so it's probably worthwhile.

One problem is, is there actually a need for another Labview book? You've
started this simply as a tutorial handout to make the cost of your course
appear less. Personally I've not read all of the supplied documentation and
have not bought any Labview books. Aside from the crap "case study" thing NI
produce. There's a few out there already, and I'd need to be convinced the
project is worthwhile before pitching in!