About the Book

This book is the product of eighteen years teaching Computer Aided Design to Civil and Industrial Engineering students at the University of Cantabria. During this time I have published two books about Visual LISP programming for AutoCAD. Back in 2003 the book Programación en AutoCAD con Visual LISP published by McGraw-Hill, which I wrote in collaboration with Professor César Otero was the first one dealing with this subject in Spanish. For ten years it has been the main resource in Spanish for Visual LISP programming. I still receive messages asking me where to buy it. It is impossible, since it is now out of print. 

In 2010 I undertook the task of preparing an updated version. The new functionalities added since 2003 to AutoCAD required a thorough revision and rewriting of the text. The new book Experto AutoCAD con Visual LISP was updated to Release 2012. But being written in Spanish limited this kind of book’s readers.

My English speaking friends encouraged me to prepare an English version which may reach a wider audience. During this time AutoCAD 2013 had been released, so that first English edition was updated to cover the few changes introduced from 2012 to 2013.
But time goes on, and now in 2018 I felt that an update was demanded. During these years we have gained experience with the new non-Com Property System which in many cases make it posible to obtain results that previously demanded the use of ActiveX properties and methods which are only available under the Windows platform. This accounts for most of the 40 new pages added to the book. The new version is identified as the Release 2019 Edition.

Back in 2003 when the first book was published, AutoLISP was not "in fashion". Not even with Visual LISP’s new contributions. Fashion followers then bet on the novelty represented by VBA. But fashion is not always rationally justified. In that book we aimed to demonstrate that the availability of other Windows dialog box modalities was not reason enough to forgo what had been our way of customizing AutoCAD for more than 15 years. That’s why we ended our book with a chapter devoted to Chad Wanless’s ObjectDCL, a plug-in which allowed the use of this kind of Graphic User Interface with AutoLISP. And ObjectDCL, now available as an open-source project under the name of OpenDCL which we can use free of charge once more deserves the new book’s last chapter.

I wish this book will guide he who uses AutoCAD in becoming a real expert. That kind of AutoCAD expert that is acquainted with, understands and can manipulate the program’s inner workings to achieve the desired output in a fast and efficient way. He who is not satisfied with what comes out of the box, but demands more.

Among the most significant new contributions of recent versions we have 3D modeling, including surfaces associativity. To them, and other advanced techniques, including parameterization, reactors, user graphic interfaces and compiling applications, more than half of this new book is devoted.

The source code for all the examples included in the book can be freely downloaded from this blog. I hope that you will not only learn from this book, but that you will enjoy doing it.