[Chris Hibner]

My experience is pretty similar to Alan's. I learned all of the text based languages from books and a lot of trial programming.

As for LabVIEW, I learned it from the LVmastery tutorial videos. Those are great. Other than those videos, it's been looking at examples and some good old-fashioned trial and error. I'm waaaaaaaaaay far from a LabVIEW expert, but I've been able to make it do what I want with relatively little effort. I think I spent a total of 3 hours watching the videos and that is all it took to start doing some cool stuff. That is what makes the dataflow languages pretty nice - you don't need big books and days of learning. They are made to be very intuitive from the start and the need to memorize the details of the syntax is mostly eliminated.