desperate for directions and suggestions

Hi there

Can someone suggest me a good VB resources for a person like me who's never had any experience in programming before . I have read the Primer and other resources , in which i mostly understand the basic operations of the GH. But, when i move along to VB and scripting section, i must admit it was a bit too hard for me to understand. My question is :

What is the best way to go about this ?

Is there any such a thing as " A Step-by Step" way to learn this thing?

Also, is Rhinoscript important and useful to learn? Can it be incorporated into GH ?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on January 2, 2010 at 4:55pm

Based on what you've said, I think that learning Rhinoscript might be a better way to go initially. Then once you've got your head wrapped around the general task of programming and get somewhat familiar with doing so in Rhino, then you can make the transition towards coding within GH.

There is no "step by step" resource for coding in GH, but RhinoScript 101 is about as close to one as you're going to get. RS101 doesn't assume any previous programming knowledge, so its really easy for beginners to pick up (that's how I started programming, along with countless others). Also, because its focused on Rhino and deals with Rhino-related tasks, its examples are much more useful and easy to follow than starting out with a generic programming book.

IMHO, Rhinoscript is just as important (if not more important) than coding within Grasshopper. The reason being that Rhinoscript (RS) can help you with a much broader range of tasks than coding in GH can. So its a very useful tool to learn and can help in situations where other people may not have GH installed (ie you can just run a script as opposed to have people go out and get GH).

However, Rhinoscript cannot be incorporated into GH, so code written for RS will not translate into usable code for GH. That doesn't mean that the concepts (in regards to programming, Rhino, and geometry in general) won't be applicable in a very significant way towards coding within GH. So the decision to learn Rhinoscript still helps in regards to your real goal of coding within GH.

My personal opinion is that learning the SDK and coding with GH is not the best way to go if you're just starting out. Although there are many good resources for VB.NET, there really isn't anything available for the .NET SDK like RhinoScript 101, and that's what it sounds like you really need. On top of that RS also has a debugger, which helps greatly when you're trying to figure out what the heck is going wrong.

If you have any further questions, just ask. Regardless of whether you choose RS or .NET within GH, I'd start keeping track of the Rhino Plugins newsgroup. Its a great place for asking questions regarding programming within Rhino, and there's plenty of knowledge there as well.

Permalink Reply by David Stasiuk on January 2, 2010 at 6:14pm

RhinoScript 101 is not only essential for programming in Rhino, it's a great introduction to programming languages in general. I often wonder if David is really just one person.

Permalink Reply by punkhead on January 2, 2010 at 10:17pm

Damien,

Thank you very very much for the suggestions , it's truly useful and i hope this could be of help to other beginners out there too.

Thanks again , this community is really great !

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