fusion-360-logo31I don't know how much Autodesk expects their Fusion 360 users to write their own custom scripts, but Autodesk have certainly made enough information available free online for anybody to give it a try. Broadly, they are divided into three categories:

  1. "Why": the Fusion 360 API User's Manual describes the overall concepts of how the API is designed and laid out. It is written to be the starting point before the programmer dives into actual code.
  2. "What": the Fusion 360 API Reference Manual documents the specific nuts and bolts of how a script communicates with Fusion 360. This is where developers go to find the small but important details necessary to write good Fusion 360 code.
  3. "How": Autodesk provides sample code so we can see some already-written scripts and get a feel of how they work. Some people may prefer to start with the code before (or possibly 'instead of') going to the concepts described in the user's manual. But every learner will need to cross-reference the sample code against the reference manual to understand everything a sample does.

I appreciated the foundation laid out by the user's manual. It left me feeling confident that I could march into the scripts and be properly oriented to understand what I'm seeing and how to find answers when I need them. Whether this confidence is misplaced or not is too early to tell at the moment.

One thing that I found interesting: Autodesk provides sample code of different styles across multiple venues. There's a fairly large set of samples alongside the manuals on Autodesk's own help website, but there is in addition a Github account "AutodeskFusion360" where script code is published. Some are samples, some are hackathon projects, and some are scripts that they're released to solve some problems that customers have raised in the forums.

Together they cover a pretty wide spectrum of code to learn from, from simplified educational code snippets to complete scripts intended to run on user workstations.