AutoCAD Programmers Reference Guide

[CiCAD]

Hi,

 

i am looking to start trying to write my own lisp, i have seen alot of refernce towards "AutoCAD Programmers Reference Guide" where can i find this? will i need this to write lisp?

[designerstuart]

it depends how complex you want to get. the tutorials at Afralisp are a good start

[BIGAL]

If you start up the tutorials supplied with Autocad theres a lisp called "down the garden path" a good place to start has lots of comments, lots of books out there, lots of tutorials here also, if you have a Kindle lots of books available.

 

Start small no good doing a lisp to excel changing 100 dwg's with multiple user dialouge selection as your first task.

[Tyke]

In AutoCAD 2010 press the Help button and the item next to the bottom of the list is "AutoLISP, VisualLISP and DXF" if you click on that you will see in the right hand pane AutoLISP Reference, AutoLISP Developer's Guide and AutoLISP Tutorial. Click on any of these items and you have the documentation that you asked for.

[Lee Mac]

i have seen alot of refernce towards "AutoCAD Programmers Reference Guide" where can i find this?

 

That reference can be found in the Help documentation of the Visual LISP IDE provided with AutoCAD, type VLIDE at the command-line to get started.

 

Here are a few tutorials I have written on the subject:

 

http://lee-mac.com/tutorials.html#vlide

 

AfraLISP also has a couple of pages on the IDE:

 

http://www.afralisp.net/visual-lisp/tutorials/visual-lisp-editor-part-1.php

[Bill Tillman]

I will make two notes here for you:

 

1. The "Down the Garden Path" is a good tutorial but it will bore you to tears. The only thing worse is all the articles which promote books to teach you LISP and they are nothing more than glorified "Hello World" programs that get you to a site filled with popup ads and find you've been used to make their click-count higher to their sponsors.

 

2. AfraLISP is an excellent learning site but be warned. The author did a good job but he leaves out important points for beginners and worse, he will post an article which tells you about selection sets, for example. He'll get you to the part where you think you're about to learn something great about what you can do with a selection set once you've selected it....and then he'll close his article with something like..."that's about it for selection sets."

 

As someone who has had to learn LISP and VLISP quickly in the last 6-7 months, I can tell you that this forum is one of the best places to get information. But again, many of the on-line articles you read will have the same theme. The author will assume you know more about it than you really do at the beginner level. And it's easy for them to describe steps 1, 2, 5, 7 and 10, but leave out steps 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9 assuming everyone knows that. Also, be prepared to search with google, bing and yahoo until you're blue in the face. And many of those searches will end with you reading someone else's post with the same question but no one replied to it.

 

Best of luck on your endeavor.

[designerstuart]

I will make two notes here for you:

 

1. The "Down the Garden Path" is a good tutorial but it will bore you to tears. The only thing worse is all the articles which promote books to teach you LISP and they are nothing more than glorified "Hello World" programs that get you to a site filled with popup ads and find you've been used to make their click-count higher to their sponsors.

 

2. AfraLISP is an excellent learning site but be warned. The author did a good job but he leaves out important points for beginners and worse, he will post an article which tells you about selection sets, for example. He'll get you to the part where you think you're about to learn something great about what you can do with a selection set once you've selected it....and then he'll close his article with something like..."that's about it for selection sets."

 

As someone who has had to learn LISP and VLISP quickly in the last 6-7 months, I can tell you that this forum is one of the best places to get information. But again, many of the on-line articles you read will have the same theme. The author will assume you know more about it than you really do at the beginner level. And it's easy for them to describe steps 1, 2, 5, 7 and 10, but leave out steps 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9 assuming everyone knows that. Also, be prepared to search with google, bing and yahoo until you're blue in the face. And many of those searches will end with you reading someone else's post with the same question but no one replied to it.

 

Best of luck on your endeavor.

 

so i'm not alone?! hooray!

[BlackBox]

Copied from another thread:

 

Hello Renderman, I am still a Novice Lisp programmer so is it possible for you to do some ;; explanation ? Some of the code is understandable but not all. I the mean time i will try to look at Afra lisp. For explanation.

 

No worries; we all start somewhere.

 

I encourage you to read anything an everything you can. You will learn a lot from common resources like the Developer Documentation, CAD Forums like this, and others who've been kind enough to share their wisdom through tutorials hosted on their website(s). One book that I found to be very easy to read, and understand, was David M. Stein's The Visual LISP Developer's Bible, 2011 Edition which is now on sale for $6.99 (image is linked):

 

 

[BIGAL]

My bible is a Autocad R12 paper copy of AutoLISP Programmers reference manual it just makes life so much easier to find a command you looking for, if you have old copies of Autocad grab it. You can not beat page flicking. The current versions of the "help" contains the same information but enhanced even more.

 

Also agree The David Stein book is well worthwhile.

 

The other thing is do a rough flow chart of the sequence of events you want to happen then write the code and if doing geometry calcs with lots of points do a sketch so you can keep track of what points are where.

[Einsener12]

I ordered a book "Autolisp Programming: Principles and Techniques Teacher". It is older one but has very good examples and tasks for reader.