Product Description

The #1 Step-by-Step Guide to LabVIEW--Now Completely Updated for LabVIEW 8! Master LabVIEW 8 with the industry's friendliest, most intuitive tutorial: LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition. Top LabVIEW experts Jeffrey Travis and Jim Kring teach LabVIEW the easy way: through carefully explained, step-by-step examples that give you reusable code for your own projects! This brand-new Third Edition has been fully revamped and expanded to reflect new features and techniques introduced in LabVIEW 8. You'll find two new chapters, plus dozens of new topics, including Project Explorer, AutoTool, XML, event-driven programming, error handling, regular expressions, polymorphic VIs, timed structures, advanced reporting, and much more. Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) candidates will find callouts linking to key objectives on NI's newest exam, making this book a more valuable study tool than ever. *Not just what to do: why to do it! *Use LabVIEW to build your own virtual workbench *Master LabVIEW's foundations: wiring, creating, editing, and debugging VIs; using controls and indicators; working with data structures; and much more *Learn the "art" and best practices of effective LabVIEW development *NEW: Streamline development with LabVIEW Express VIs *NEW: Acquire data with NI-DAQmx and the LabVIEW DAQmx VIs *NEW: Discover design patterns for error handling, control structures, state machines, queued messaging, and more *NEW: Create sophisticated user interfaces with tree and tab controls, drag and drop, subpanels, and more Whatever your application, whatever your role, whether you've used LabVIEW or not, LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition is the fastest, easiest way to get the results you're after!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17277 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1032 pages

From the Back Cover

The #1 Step-by-Step Guide to LabVIEW—Now Completely Updated for LabVIEW 8!

Master LabVIEW 8 with the industry’s friendliest, most intuitive tutorial: LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition. Top LabVIEW experts Jeffrey Travis and Jim Kring teach LabVIEW the easy way: through carefully explained, step-by-step examples that give you reusable code for your own projects!

This brand-new Third Edition has been fully revamped and expanded to reflect new features and techniques introduced in LabVIEW 8. You’ll find two new chapters, plus dozens of new topics, including Project Explorer, AutoTool, XML, event-driven programming, error handling, regular expressions, polymorphic VIs, timed structures, advanced reporting, and much more. Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) candidates will find callouts linking to key objectives on NI’s newest exam, making this book a more valuable study tool than ever.

• Not just what to do: why to do it!
• Use LabVIEW to build your own virtual workbench
• Master LabVIEW’s foundations: wiring, creating, editing, and debugging VIs; using controls and indicators; working with data structures; and much more
• Learn the “art” and best practices of effective LabVIEW development
• NEW: Streamline development with LabVIEW Express VIs
• NEW: Acquire data with NI-DAQmx and the LabVIEW DAQmx VIs
• NEW: Discover design patterns for error handling, control structures, state machines, queued messaging, and more
• NEW: Create sophisticated user interfaces with tree and tab controls, drag and drop, subpanels, and more

Whatever your application, whatever your role, whether you’ve used LabVIEW or not, LabVIEW for Everyone, Third Edition is the fastest, easiest way to get the results you’re after!

About the Author

Jeffrey Travis provides expert consulting and creates books, courses, and products for remote Internet controls and monitoring, virtual instrumentation, and Web applications through his company, Jeffrey Travis Studios. He has more than fifteen years of experience developing software, teaching, and consulting on LabVIEW and related technologies. He holds an M.S. in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Jim Kring is president of James Kring, Inc., a leader in LabVIEW development, system integration consulting, and custom software design. He is founder of OpenG, a foundation promoting open-source LabVIEW tools, applications, frameworks, and documentation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

LabVIEW is a graphical programming language that has been widely adopted throughout industry, academia, and research labs as the standard for data acquisition and instrument control software. LabVIEW is a powerful and flexible instrumentation and analysis software system that is multiplatform—you can run LabVIEW on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can also run LabVIEW on PDAs (PalmOS, PocketPC, or Windows CE devices), on real-time platforms, and even embed LabVIEW programs into FPGA chips and 32-bit microprocessors. Creating your own LabVIEW program, or virtual instrument (VI), is simple. LabVIEW's intuitive user interface makes writing and using programs exciting and fun!

LabVIEW departs from the sequential nature of traditional programming languages and features an easy-to-use graphical programming environment, including all of the tools necessary for data acquisition (DAQ), data analysis, and presentation of results. With its graphical programming language, sometimes called "G," you program using a graphical block diagram that compiles into machine code. Ideal for a countless number of science and engineering applications, LabVIEW helps you solve many types of problems in only a fraction of the time and hassle it would take to write "conventional" code.

Beyond the Lab

LabVIEW has found its way into such a broad spectrum of virtual instrumentation applications that it is hard to know where to begin. As its name implies, it began in the laboratory and still remains very popular in many kinds of laboratories—from major research and development laboratories around the world (such as Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, Batelle, Sandia, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, White Sands, and Oak Ridge in the United States, and CERN in Europe), to R&D laboratories in many industries, and to teaching laboratories in universities all over the world, especially in the disciplines of electrical and mechanical engineering and physics.

The spread of LabVIEW beyond the laboratory has gone in many directions—up (aboard the space shuttle), down (aboard U.S. Navy submarines), and around the world (from oil wells in the North Sea to factories in New Zealand). And with the latest Internet capabilities, LabVIEW applications are being deployed not only physically in many places, but virtually across networked applications. More and more people are creating web-based control or monitoring of their LabVIEW applications to allow remote access and instant information about what's happening in their lab. Virtual instrumentation systems are known for their low cost, both in hardware and development time, and their great flexibility.

The Expanding World of Virtual Instrumentation

Perhaps the best way to describe the expansion (or perhaps explosion) of LabVIEW applications is to generalize it. There are niches in many industries where measurements of some kind are required—most often of temperature, whether it be in an oven, a refrigerator, a greenhouse, a clean room, or a vat of soup. Beyond temperature, users measure pressure, force, displacement, strain, pH, and so on, ad infinitum. Personal computers are used virtually everywhere. LabVIEW is the catalyst that links the PC with measuring things, not only because it makes it easy, but also because it brings along the ability to analyze what you have measured and display it and communicate it halfway around the world if you so choose.

After measuring and analyzing something, the next logical step often is to change (control) something based upon the results. For example, measure temperature and then turn on either a furnace or a chiller. Again, LabVIEW makes this easy to do; monitoring and control have become LabVIEW strengths. Sometimes it is direct monitoring and control, or it may be through communicating with a programmable logic controller (PLC) in what is commonly called supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA).

The Results

A few of LabVIEW's many uses include the following:

• Simulating heart activity
• Controlling an ice cream-making process
• Detecting hydrogen gas leaks on the space shuttle
• Monitoring feeding patterns of baby ostriches
• Modeling power systems to analyze power quality
• Measuring physical effects of exercise in lab rats
• Controlling motion of servo and stepper motors
• Testing circuit boards in computers and other electronic devices
• Simulating motion in a virtual reality system
• Allowing remote navigation and feedback over the web of a helium-filled blimp
• Automatically generating cover sheets for your TPS reports

Objectives of This Book

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. You can also get updates to the examples, activities, book errata, and other related resources and information at http://labviewforeveryone.com. 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.

Fundamentals

Chapter 1, "What in the World is LabVIEW?," describes LabVIEW and introduces you to some of LabVIEW's features and uses.

In Chapter 2, "Virtual Instrumentation: Hooking Your Computer Up to the Real World," you will get an overview of virtual instrumentation: how data acquisition, GPIB, serial port communication, and data analysis are performed with LabVIEW.

In Chapter 3, "The LabVIEW Environment," you will get acquainted with the LabVIEW environment, including the LabVIEW Project Explorer, the essential parts of a virtual instrument (or VI), the Help window, menus, tools, palettes, and subVIs.

In Chapters 4 and 5, "LabVIEW Foundations" and "Yet More Foundations," you will become familiar with the basics of programming in LabVIEW—using controls and indicators (such as numerics, Booleans, and strings); wiring, creating, editing, debugging, and saving VIs; creating subVIs; and documenting your work. You will also begin to understand why LabVIEW is considered a dataflow programming language.

Chapter 6, "Controlling Program Execution with Structures," describes the basic programming structures in LabVIEW: While Loops, For Loops, shift registers, Case Structures, Sequence Structures, and Formula Nodes. It also teaches you how to introduce timing into your programs. You will be introduced to easy-to-use frameworks that combine the While Loop and Case Structure to ...

Customer Reviews

Good book on general LabVIEW programming from the ground up
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

The Single Best Overall Book On 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.

an easy modular approach
[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.