Programming 101: The How and Why of Programming Revealed Using the Processing Programming Language

Understand the importance of programming, even if you’ve never programmed before! This book will teach you the basics of programming using the Processing programming language. You will create your own Processing sketches, using personal images, themes, or hobbies that you enjoy. The chapters in the book will demonstrate the process of programming, starting with formulating an idea, planning, building on past projects, and refining the work, similar to writing an essay or composing a song. This approach will guide you to make use of logic and mathematics to produce beautiful effects. The term for program in Processing is sketch, though the sketches featured in this book are far more than static drawings; they incorporate interaction, animation, video, audio, and accessing files on the local computer and on the Web. Technical features are introduced and explained in the context of complete examples: games (Snake, Hangman, jigsaw, slingshot), making a collage of family images and video clips, preparing directions for folding an origami model, rotating objects in 3D, and others. Programming is a fun, creative, expressive pursuit. It requires attention to details and can be frustrating, but there is very little that compares to the satisfaction of building a program out of nothing and making it work (or taking an existing program and fixing a problem, or adding a feature and making it better). Programming 101 is your gateway to making this happen.

What You Will Learn

• Gain basic programming skills
• Build fun and creative programs
• Use files for making a holiday card
• Combine videos, images, and graphics in a Processing sketch

Who This Book Is For

Anyone who has been thinking about trying programming, or has tried, but needs more motivation; anyone who wants to learn about the Processing language.

About the Author

Jeanine Meyer is a Professor at Purchase College/SUNY and past Coordinator of the Mathematics/Computer Science Board of Study. Before Purchase, she taught at Pace University and worked at IBM Research and other parts of IBM and at other companies. She is the author of 4 books and co-author of 3 more on topics ranging from educational uses of multimedia, programming (two published by Apress), databases and number theory. She earned a PhD in computer science at the Courant Institute at New York University, an MA in mathematics at Columbia, and a SB (the college used the Latin form) in mathematics from the University of Chicago. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Association of Women in Science, Association of Computing Machinery, and a featured reviewer for ACM Computing Reviews. Jeanine is trying but remains a beginner at Spanish and piano.