Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW, A

Still Relevant. Obviously some of the code examples (which were written in LabVIEW 6.0) are dated, but the principles and ideas are as relevant today as they were when it was written. It is probably one of the easiest reading software books out there. Steve's sense of humor shines through. I literally sat down and breezed through it in 3 sittings.

I'm not sure what is the cause of the bad reviews over picture quality. The pictures look great in the edition I have - if there was a problem, it's fixed now. The content of the book is great and gives LabVIEW programmers (both new and old) a quality approach to engineering good code.I would definitely get this one to add to the reference library if you are or are interested in becoming a LabVIEW programmer.

This book is very germain for advanced LabVIEW Programmers and touches on the inportance of "Architecture" for LabVIEW code. It outlines OO Object Oriented coding and its application specifically in LabVIEW. I would have liked to see more examples - but I could easily fill in the blanks.A recommeded reference to have for any experienced LabVIEW programmer. [...]

I love "A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW". It is a book intended for the intermediate to advanced LabVIEW programmer. It is a crash course on Software Design using LabVIEW as the tool. It introduces the concept of LabVIEW Component Oriented Design (LCOD) making the development of large applications manageable. LCOD is programming based on Action Engines ( a.k.a. functional global variables), but do not be discouraged by this, because the principles still apply to LVOOP and the ideas of planning/designing your application before laying the first wire still applies. It also has useful information on how to gather requirements, prototype and design the user interface.The first copies of the book were excellent quality. However, some of them are not so good, making the images non-readable (have we mentioned that LabVIEW is a "graphical programming language"! ). The information is still great and you can follow up on updates that Steve Watts maintains through his blog "Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design" available via National Instruments website.This book was invaluable when I started doing LabVIEW consulting on my own. Unfortunately given that Prentice-Hall decided to move it to "on-demand" printing (hence you may end up getting a poor quality printout), I don't think the authors would be encouraged to write any updates anytime soon.

As a self-taught, 10-year veteran LabVIEW developer, reading this book was a huge eye-opener to all the things that you should be doing with a large project. I recently changed jobs to a company that practices RUP, and have been struggling to fit LabVIEW into this development framework. This is the crash-course in software engineering I should have taken in school, but didn't.Some of the chapters cover topics in NI's courses and online documentation (front panel and block diagram styles, state machines, loose-coupling and strong-cohesion, GOOP). However the real jems in this book are:1) how to put together software specifications for proposals, including strong focus on pre-coding tasks such as GUI prototyping for customers and post-coding tasks such as testing and metrics for customer acceptance. Much of the architecture of a project occurs at the proposal/specification stage and this book dedicates a whole chapter to it including an example specification;2) a methodical approach to defining objects ("components" in the language of this book, but GOOP to the rest of us);3) the concept of data flow designs to section up a larger project into smaller chunks you can get your mind around.The examples are some of the best I have seen in print. The authors have not chosen overly-simplistic examples, nor have they chosen overly-abstract examples. There are plenty of screen shots and "software meat" to look at.The other part of this book that I liked was the "Why LabVIEW Sucks" section, which addresses the "C++/C#/VB/.net/[insert other language here] is so much better than LabVIEW, why should I use LabVIEW" question every LabVIEW developer runs into eventually. Sure, they're preaching to the choir here, but they do acknowledge that LabVIEW has a fundamental image problem, explain why they think it has it, and why as an advanced developer you should understand that the problem is its image and not anything fundamentally wrong with LabVIEW.This is not a book on the mechanics of programming LabVIEW. There are some programming techniques in here (state machines, GOOP), but you can get this for free from NI's website. It is written for the architect of the team (the person doing proposal writing, high-level design, interacting with the customer, etc.), not the code-jockeys actually writing the code.

This book was a quick read, rather short. About half of the book goes over actual programming concepts, and the other half goes over a long design example scenario. The book is written in a fun engaging way, but in my mind the book costs a little too much for such a short read.Coming in, I was an intermediate Labview user, and the book has opened my eyes to some better ways to program.For those of you complaining about the quality of the figures, visit the website at authors.phptr.com/watts. Note that there is a typo in the URL on the back cover!

The book is very well written but the reproduction is horrid. Very few of the figures are readable. It looks like a particularly bad reproduction on a poorly tuned copier. Prentice Hall should refund my money except they refuse to even acknowledge my complaint. I have since found out from a LabVIEW user group that except for an early printing, all of the books are very poorly printed. Unfortunately, the figures contain the most important information. I really wish I could get a clean copy. DO NOT BUY THE BOOK unless you first see the figures!!!! Its vertually useless without readable figures!

OK

A book full of very good tipps for intermediate and advanced LabView users. Actually one of the very few books aimed at LabView users that does not use half of its space for a beginners introduction into programming, telling how to build yet another "Hello World".Not the first book to be read by a beginner but still easy to read and understand.Unfortunately I found that it is a lottery whether you get a decent copy of the book or not. The one in the company was a standard-quality paperback. The printing quality of the pictures in the copy I recieved was just terrible. Do you still remember the b/w-daily newspaper pictures of the early eighties with something like 20 dpi? Then you know what I mean.Any LabView user will understand that VI-code examples with bad picture quality are as useful as C-Code examples printed with green letters on red paper.Five points for the content, two points for the printing quality, average rounded down as the content sometimes even was not understandable due to the bad printing quality.

The book is no "LabVIEW for dummies", so it wouldn't be a great buy for someone totally new to LabVIEW. However, if one is familiar with the environment the book is a treasure trove. It is an interesting read (despite the rather poor graphics) and could make an invaluable resource for someone shaping up to take on the challenge of their first large application.