First of all hello,

I am a beginner to Processing and even to coding. Well i started to code with processing, and i was enjoying it so much. i finished some PDFs, learned OOP programming and such. I am a designer myself, and i really would love Processing to be my medium tool. I've always wanted to create real-time visuals, installations and such. The problem is, when it comes to math i just can't do anything, and i do not understand why the Source Codes i download have that hard to understand calculations (at least to me). When it comes to creativity i cant do stuff because i know nothing about math and it's nature. But i am really willing to do something about code-art.

As you know i am in need of some suggestions, like should i take a Math course, or i don't even need it? Or is there something i do wrong i should know?

Oh, and those PVector Classes and such, vectors and physics are like out of my range, As a result what should i do to become a code artist?

Thank you for your time and suggestions.

In general, when I say I am a programmer, people exclaim: "Ooh, you must be good at math!".
And I try to persuade them programming has little to do with maths, actually, beside simple operations you do on your calculator, and lot, lot of logic. So once you learned to do +, -, *, / and wrapped your mind around hexadecimal (and binary) concepts, and the or/and/not/xor concepts (logical and binary), optionally the shift operations and square root, you are good to go for 90% of your programming needs.

Hey, if you ever need to do stats, integration or projection, in general you don't do the deep maths yourself, you find a good library doing the hard stuff for you, and just use it (although at least a light understanding of what is going on allows to avoid the biggest mistakes by checking results are looking good).

Except, of course, this applies mostly to business/technical programming, the one most computer engineer practice every day.
Obviously, and you hit that yourself, Processing and other similar visual frameworks, often ask you some more math knowledge, particularly on the geometry area, starting with simple trigonometry and vector manipulations, optionally dipping into matrix operations, numerical analysis (something I had the hardest time to wrap my mind around at the university... I should try and study it again to see if my PoV has changed over time) and so on.

Alas, I have no hard and fast advice. Like RickiG, I would advice to look tutorials on geometry, first because it has immediate results on the usage with Processing (and you can use Processing to help grasping some concepts!), secondly because as a designer, you might find easier to understand the visual concepts (I know I do, I am a visual guy).

Studying with somebody (math course) might help, but you have to find the right guy (or gal), patient, lively, more on the concrete side than on the theoretical one... A good prof can make the topic fascinating, a bad one can disgust you definitively...

In my experience, programming/whatever is not about math, it's about logic. It's about thinking like a computer (since that's what you are doing, really) and being able to "bend the rules" to make a computer act how you want it to.

With enough practice, programming can turn into poetry. Once you know the language, the manipulation of that language is like the manipulation of any language. Of course, it is fairly more limited than say English. However, that doesn't mean it lacks harmony, nuance, and the possibility of beauty.

But all that comes after spending a couple of years learning and using a language. And even then, if you learn concepts as you learn the technical implementation of concepts, transitioning from one language to another becomes easy.

Yes, it takes years. Your first language is important, but it's not going to kill you later. I learned PHP and ActionScript 2.0 at the same time as my first languages, so I was great at procedural code but not so much at OOP. But I overcame that, and was able to incorporate strong procedural methods into my object-oriented approaches.

Anyway.... it just takes time. And the ability to spend that time experimenting. Which is why Processing is great, because the language itself almost begs for exploration.