Uh, hmmm. Let me try that again…
 

 
Drat.     Oh,   OK,   I get it:
 

 

The Dynamo Primer has been a labor of love for me, Matt Jezyk, Zach Kron, and for the folks at Mode Lab since early this summer. We knew that Dynamo was growing faster than we could teach it ourselves. Users coming to Dynamo with every level of prior experience deserved a better entry point into visual scripting and computational BIM. Whatever we made to help the community needed to be a living document just as the software itself is growing up so publicly, out in the open. Now, the Primer is open source too.

Our solution was to create an online resource that you could read like a friendly book and and that you could reference for when you know exactly what you want. And we knew that the people who should help us build the first edition were the same folks that the built their business on teaching, supporting, and encouraging computational designers. (The same folks, by the way, who hosted the first ever Dynamo workshop I helped teach. I recently found a recording, and I’ll just say that it was humbling to watch, and Dynamo has come so far since then.)

Thank you, Mode Lab, for the terrific job you guys did getting our primer started.

The last third of the first edition of the primer has now been published. With this third set of chapters, you can read about how to extend Dynamo with custom nodes, Ironn Python, packages, and Zero-Touch Import.

There is also an extended appendix, which now includes an index of useful nodes and a list of great packages.

But we’re not done yet. Now you, Dear Reader, have every right and every privilege to be an author yourself. We got it started, and while the Dynamo team will do its best to maintain the primer so that it keeps pace with the software, we your help. Is there something missing? Can you explain something better? Change it! The Primer is now on Github together with the source code for Dynamo itself. And the same community-centric, open-source rules apply.

Learn how to edit and submit changes here.

Happy reading, sharing, and editing!

 

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P. S. – I have to settle a long-standing debate. How should one pronounce primer? It turns out the way I have been saying it through the full duration of this project is wrong. The voice in my head every time I wrote or read all the meeting notes, blog posts, emails, and git commits was inadvertently British. And I fear that I have been encouraging my colleagues to use the Queen’s English by accident. According to the unequivocally definitive Merriam-Webster.com, it’s:
 

 
I stand corrected, and you’ll have to accept my apology. However, feel free to pronounce it however you like, or… fancy.