How to learn and improve AutoLISP (including ActiveX..) - any suggestion appreciated

[stoweiJY4E2]

Hi everyone (or especially more experienced users),

Hope this is not a stupid question... but how do you learn and improve the Autocad Customization Languages (Lisp, or VBA, or any other...)

I'm kind of a self-learner here, was keen to read the online reference guide here AutoCAD 2025 Developer and ObjectARX Help | Autodesk but sometimes get lost on the structure of the help file.. One typical example is the confusion with VL/VLA/VLAX/VLR? functions with AutoLISP, where I'll have to browse through multiple pages under different topics to get some meaningful answer. Sometimes it can be quite frustrating and discouraging to a self-learner...

Or I wish there was a downloadable catalogue of the help file so I can do some offline search or bookmark, instead of going online and get lost everytime.

I can't imagine how life was like before Chatgpt, which I'm heavily relying on now..

Any suggestions on how to improve efficiency on the learning process?

Thank you very much.

[EnM4st3r · Accepted solution]

i personally like the AutoLisp Extension for VSC. since you can just right click any function and hit "open online help" wich takes you to the correct documentation.
Also for activeX there is some documentation under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\en-US

look at the .chm files

[ВeekeeCZ · Accepted solution]

Try The Visual LISP Developers Bible by David Stein. 

[Moshe-A · Accepted solution]

@stoweiJY4E2  hi,

Well, you are exactly at the dilemma where each of us been some time 😀. one thing i can tell you, it will not take few hours or day or two, this takes a lot of time even years. down the road you will Gaining more Experience as you write your own code and see others code. your will investigate (and try) new functions, learn their arguments and return values.

VL/VLA/VLAX/VLR functions are just more sets of functions added to classic AutoLISP. you should start with classic functions, understand how to select object/objects (entsel)/(ssget) use (entget) to retrieve object data and (entmod) to change/update it. when you feel you have understanding of that move to VLA-object.

enjoy

Moshe

[paullimapa · Accepted solution]

A great place to learn is to go through these free online lessons

https://www.afralisp.net

[Sea-Haven]

Also look at some of the electronic books online, I got some from Kindle books very cheap and can copy code from book.

[stoweiJY4E2]

I'm not going to reply to each one's comment. Thanks for everyone's insights and help! 

[stoweiJY4E2]

Interestingly I'm using the same but never knew about this "open online help" as you mentioned, and can't find it on my right click menus either. I played with the settings a bit (maybe disabling and enabling again) and now it's showing up.

Wish I had asked the question way earlier! Thanks for the advice.

[tramber]

Back in 2001 or something, I was one of the first clients in France of a new website exclusively in English to get some specialized books : its name was Amazon !

They shipped me some books.

+ nice web pages in HTML that many people here can remember and still find if they want

= the beginning of a learning.

I understood Visual by the years.

Today, I got no idea of IA, no time to start !

My advice would be to practice and to read your own code without any IA to correct but yourself.