I want to learn OpenScad! Anyone have any tips?

[truly_bent]

OME;

Read through your entire OpenSCAD Help Center thread last night. I ran across OpenSCAD not long ago, and being a C programmer since before the Great Flood, i was intrigued, but knew that if i got sucked into it, it could end up eating up SCADs of time (Ha! SCADs of time. Get it? Maybe not - you're from "down unda"). Anyway, i decided to scan the manual and started loading up a few .scad programs to have a look. Haven't studied that threaded screw program you posted, but saved it for later.

Got to the 'concat' function and found out it didn't work. What the...? You gotta have a concat() function, in any language. Upon further investigation it turns out that it doesn't work in the current "stable" release of 2104.03, but does work in the "development snapshot" release 2015.01.08 (scroll to bottom). This new release has a few more fixes and is prettier to boot. Recommended.

I agree with one of the guys, in the other thread, that OpenJSCAD is a better product. It can, by the way, be run locally (on your computer) as opposed to running it in the cloud. The upside is that OpenSCAD and OpenJSCAD are 90% compatible, and so most of what you learn in OpenSCAD can be transferable in the future.

Of what i know so far, i tend to agree with other critics that the language itself is a bit of a "dog's breakfast". This business of calling a translate function before the creation (instantiation) of an object seems counterintuitive. Once these foibles are accepted though, things can move ahead.

[Roxy]

I agree with one of the guys, in the other thread, that OpenJSCAD is a better product. It can, by the way, be run locally (on your computer) as opposed to running it in the cloud. The upside is that OpenSCAD and OpenJSCAD are 90% compatible, and so most of what you learn in OpenSCAD can be transferable in the future.

I haven't had time to mess with it yet, but OpenJScad does look much 'cleaner'. It fixes some of the syntax issues with OpenScad and it also eliminates some of the deficiencies (like singular variable assignments). I suspect we will see OpenJScad start to replace OpenScad soon.