Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

This book assumes that you have little, or no, programming experience and wish to learn Processing ... a language which has functions that simplify graphics. If you have written sketches for the Arduino microcontroller, or used C++, then you you will immediately feel at home.The examples within the book cover all of the building blocks from simple to advanced. Each example is annotated in such a way that new concepts are easy to grasp. Solutions to all of the questions within the book may be accessed from the Help menu within Processing.In terms of difficulty the first quarter of the book covers the basics ... well worth reading to learn the finer points of the language. The remainder of the book progresses towards advanced. What Processing can achieve is mind boggling.I have three other books on Processing ... I wish that I had found this book first.

I've used this book several years now to teach programming to students who have no programming experience. The book is written just for this audience, but is very different from a traditional textbook. Daniel Shiffman breaks everything down into very simple to understand concepts and uses a variety of illustrations to explain. Following along with the author, students are writing short programs that produce interest visual output. Processing is a great set of libraries, allowing the beginning programmer to produce graphical output. Additionally, Daniel Shiffman, has a companion website and a great YouTube channel, called The Coding Train.

Text is easy to read and provides a progressive learning method. Language syntax is easy and the animations run quickly and have support for OpenGL graphics. The Processing Language has a large number of graphics primitives' that make it easy to construct a variety of animated math and physics simulations.

This is a nice introduction to programming. Slow paced, step by step, introducing more complex programming constructs only when the need for them is already clear, when the pain of programming without them is evident. Explanations are always made as simple as possible, though sometimes verging on the simplistic. As to Processing, one is left wondering whether one should not be using p5 instead, given Processing's limitations for the web.

This book was a great enhancement for my beginner course at the university. I used the examples in the book to better help the students learn the material.

Combining math with arts makes studying and programming fun. I bought this book as extra (reference material) to Daniels courses on the internet (processing.org) but turned it around - now this book gives me a basis and I watch videos for inspiration. Especially for those who find programming (Java) boring . . . well, not after reading (and using!) this book.

I strongly recommend this book. Well written with complete code, a strong tour of Processing and its wider ecosystem. The only caveat I would add is that if you have any programming/computer science background, a lot of this will be non-applicable to you and you'll skim through about 60% of the book to pick up the Processing-specific syntax.

The content is fantastic, but I'm having trouble using it in the kindle version. Will likely need to purchase the hardback version as well. Still it's great to have as a digital version when traveling. Processing rocks!