I’m working to develop a “learning path” for people who know one or more Autodesk products from a user perspective but are interested in getting more into programming them: perhaps during their engineering studies they took one or two programming classes (perhaps not), and now feel that implementing some level of automation would be beneficial to themselves or to their colleagues. Or perhaps their boss has just told them to find out how all this stuff works. Or – and this is an altogether more sobering alternative – they have recently lost their jobs and are contemplating a career change, taking advantage of the Autodesk Assistance Program to get access to Autodesk software and are looking to complement existing design skills with the ability to customize and develop for our software.
I’d really like to hear your opinion on this topic, whatever your own personal motivation for learning programming. I knew programming before I knew AutoCAD, so I came at this from another direction and to some degree find myself too far along my own learning path to properly assess the current tools for learning programming fundamentals (it was just so long ago that I went through this myself). So this post is really a call for help: if any readers of this blog have recently tried to learn how to program for Autodesk software (or any software, for that matter, as I’m most interested in the resources related to the core programming fundamentals, rather than the product-specific side of things) then I’d very much appreciate you letting me know what worked for you and what didn’t.
Some examples: Microsoft provides an online learning service called Ramp Up – have any of you tried it to learn programming with .NET? What good books or – ideally – free resources have you used to get started with programming? Please post a comment or send me an email.
