Do you have programming experience? Have you written a lot of programs? Are any of them fairly large? Note that C, C++, Fortran, Pascal, Basic, Matlab, etc. all qualify as "programming experience". Experience is fairly important here, as well as code that is "fairly large" -- there's nothing like a 1000-line printout of a single routine with no "structure" to get you thinking about learning good programming practices, including Good Documentation ("Write the Documentation First"), use of "top-down" design, have routines that do "one thing, well", etc.
I had such a background when I was introduced to LabVIEW. I was fortunate to be paired with an experienced LabVIEW developer who taught me the "mechanics" (just as well, as he left within six months, leaving me with a huge, disorganized, 1000-VI LabVIEW routine with none of the VIs having any documentation. I was fortunate to have the luxury to let the old software "coast along", while I redesigned and rewrote it from scratch ...
I highly recommend finding a Mentor, and putting in the time to develop Good Habits. When I started working with LabVIEW, I read Peter Blume's book, The LabVIEW Style Book, cover-to-cover about 3 times (and all of my VIs now have Icons, and all have a Description, and all, or at least 95%, have Block Diagrams that fit on a single Laptop screen ...).
Bob Schor
