The MDSplus tutorial Preface

So, you have heard about MDSplus, and you are maybe curious to discover more about this system. You connect to the [[1]] site, download the system, install it and then.... you get lost in the large cornucopia of tools and libraries. Now, you will surely try to surf the MDSplus documentation in order to understand which components are useful for what, and you will probably feel a bit disappointed because you can find detailed descriptions of Application Programming Interfaces and scripting languages, but no document where a beginner can start working and understanding the system from scratch.

This is exactly the purpose of this tutorial, which will describe all the steps required to set up a data acquisition system (which is, by the way, the purpose of the MDSplus tool).

We shall start from a very simple application, and then we shall progressively extend it by adding new components and by learning to use new tools, until we'll have built a fully fledged data acquisition system and, above all, we'll have learnt how to use the varoius tools and libraries of MDSplus. Afterwards, you will be confident enough to look into the technical documentation, use MDSplus for the rapid development of data acquisition systems and, why not, to contribute to the development of MDSplus with new ideas and developments.