A First, Fat Book For Processing

July 5th 17:39
by why

Hey, alright, there’s a new book titled Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art that looks to be the first textbook covering the Proce55ing language! Like most programming books, it looks morbidly obese in photos but the review posted on Abstract Machine says to skip the first few chapters and just jump straight into the fun stuff:

We’ll be dog-earing many pages, meethinks. Chapter 11 on “Motion” is worth the price of admission alone: it gives you all the basics you need to know about making things move around using all the basic rules of gravity, collision, reflection, etc. And Chapter 13 is a fairly good introduction to d*3 that we will probably use as an introduction in the atelier. So all-in-all, it’s a good classroom book, which appears to be by design.

If you’ve considered learning ActionScript and Flash, just hold off and get this book instead. Processing is like Flash, but without the 3-D timeline to bury all your stuff in. Plus, the Java dialect in Processing is just more sensible, easier to latch on to than Flash. Now, please, don’t mention Flash ever again!

9 comments

hgs

said on July 6th 05:57

This one’s slipped past me. Any links to a homepage for this language? Book ISBN? Thanks. Good to see you posting again.

greay

said on July 6th 11:40

processing.org

hgs

said on July 6th 12:20

Thanks, and:

  1. ISBN-10: 159059617X
  2. ISBN-13: 978-1590596173

source: amazon.com; Lots of other interesting books show up there as well, which I’ve not explored.

giles bowkett

said on July 6th 12:49

awesome! I was looking for the other processing book (http://www.amazon.com/Processing-Programming-Handbook-Designers-Artists/dp/0262182629/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104-3818534-9165521) the other day but it’s not out yet.

Brian

said on July 6th 14:17

This author’s artistic perspective looks like a great way to view programming in Procssing. I’ve used the Processing language to do some programming with Arduino–since it’s also a great language for doing physical computing with microcontrollers, LEDs etc. Fantastic fun packed into this language. I hadn’t seen the book–but the book + software looks like a winning combination.

Peter B.

said on July 18th 04:10

It seems like I need Chapter 11, as it’s where I fall down on most of my sketches. But the books a bit pricey at £30 (~$60). Maybe I should just steal it from the hyenas down the road instead.

Hank

said on July 19th 11:20

I made a 0install package for it. There’s instructions here!


0launch http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/0install/Processing.xml

Maybe I should set up a 0install package for HacketyHack for Linux. Apparently it works for Mac too, so perhaps someone could use 0install on a Mac version of HacketyHack.

Lets make some awesome animations!

Hank

said on July 20th 00:12

Woohoo! Fun!

Swaroop

said on July 22nd 12:58

If you can try Flex , you can avoid the “3D timeline”. Flex is very dev-friendly, go ahead, give it a try.

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