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Which book first (Read 587 times)
processor
Which book first
Sep 30th, 2008, 9:41pm  

Hello everyone. I would like to start the adventure with Processing, but I have two questions:

1.
Which book should I read first: Learning Processing
By Daniel Shiffman? If yes, what next? Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art By Ira Greenberg and than Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists and Visualizing Data By Ben Fry, or maybe there is another better way?

2.
I know, that Processing and Actionscript are different kind of programming, but I'd like to know Yours opinion. What is the best programming language for making things like Jared Tarbell's http://www.levitated.net especially things like:

http://www.levitated.net/daily/levEmotionFractal.html
http://www.levitated.net/daily/levPondCode.html
http://www.levitated.net/bones/mxComponents/examples/FMXComp-particle-poetry.html


I mean, things connecting words and interactive animation, something like digital poetry. Is it actionscript/flash, or Processing?

Greetings,
processor
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Eav
Re: Which book first
Reply #1 - Sep 30th, 2008, 10:46pm  
Hi,

I was, and probably still am, a total noob.  First i bought the Reas & Fry book, then the Greenberg and recently the Shiffman book.  And from my experience, it feels more right the other way around.  The Shiffman is a high end "Processing for dummies", things are explained from the ground up.  After that one, i think you can easily combine the other two books.

Only my opinion of course.

Best

yves
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volts
Re: Which book first
Reply #2 - Oct 1st, 2008, 2:54pm  
The descriptions at http://processing.org/learning/books/index.html are pretty accurate.

For your purposes, I'd skip Visualizing Data.  It is a very good book on,  (unsurprisingly) visualizing data that only incidentally covers Processing.

Reas/Fry takes things from the perspective of how to achieve particular artistic results; Greenburg lets the programming technique drive the exploration.

I play with Processing for personal entertainment.  Reas/fry is what lives in my laptop bag at the moment.
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processor
Re: Which book first
Reply #3 - Oct 2nd, 2008, 2:04pm  
Thanks everyone!
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Psysoul
Re: Which book first
Reply #4 - Oct 2nd, 2008, 10:52pm  
If you are new to programming I'd suggest to start with Greenbergs book, it explains procedular programming and then later OOP too.

I am not new to OOP, but it gave me a nice review of oop paradigms and other good things of processing. (I am about half-way in the book).

As for actionscript vs processing: Processing can give you much more freedom, and it can easily be used for quite different things using libraries (like picture and sound processing or creating).
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