How This Book Is Organized

The chapters in this book are organized as follows:

• 1/Hello: Learn about Processing.py.

• 2/Starting to Code: Create your first Processing.py program.

• 3/Draw: Define and draw simple shapes.

• 4/Variables: Store, modify, and reuse data.

• 5/Response: Control and influence programs with the mouse and the keyboard.

• 6/Translate, Rotate, Scale: Transform the coordinates.

• 7/Media: Load and display media, including images, fonts, and vector files.

• 8/Motion: Move and choreograph shapes.

• 9/Functions: Build new code modules.

• 10/Objects: Create code modules that combine variables and functions.

• 11/Lists: Simplify working with lists of variables.

• 12/Data and Dictionaries: Load and visualize data using the dictionary data structure.

• 13/Extend: Learn about sound, PDF export, and reading data from an Arduino board.

Who This Book Is For

This book is written for people who want a casual and concise introduction to computer programming so that they can create images and simple interactive programs. It’s especially suited to beginning programmers who want to learn the Python programming language. Getting Started with Processing.py is not a programming textbook; as the title suggests, it will get you started. It’s for teenagers, hobbyists, grandparents, and everyone in between.

This book is also appropriate for people with programming experience, particularly in the Python programming language, who want to learn the basics of interactive computer graphics. Getting Started with Processing.py contains techniques that can be applied to creating games, animation, and interfaces.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from Make: books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Make: Getting Started with Processing.py by Allison Parrish, Ben Fry, and Casey Reas. Copyright 2016 Maker Media, Inc., 978-1-457-18683-7.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given here, feel free to contact us at [email protected].

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How to Contact Us

Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:

• Maker Media, Inc.
• 1160 Battery Street East, Suite 125
• San Francisco, California 94111
• 800-998-9938 (in the United States or Canada)
• http://makermedia.com/contact-us/

Make: unites, inspires, informs, and entertains a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. Make: celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your will. The Make: audience continues to be a growing culture and community that believes in bettering ourselves, our environment, our educational system—our entire world. This is much more than an audience, it’s a worldwide movement that Make: is leading—we call it the Maker Movement.

For more information about Make:, visit us online:

• Make: magazine: http://makezine.com/magazine/
• Maker Faire: http://makerfaire.com
• Makezine.com: http://makezine.com
• Maker Shed: http://makershed.com/

Acknowledgments

We thank Brian Jepson, Anna Kaziunas France, and Patrick DiJusto for their great energy, support, and insight.

We can’t imagine this book without Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino (Maker Media). Massimo’s excellent book is the prototype.

A small group of individuals has, for years, contributed essential time and energy to Processing. Dan Shiffman is our partner in the Processing Foundation, the 501(c)(3) organization that supports the Processing software. Much of the core code for Processing 2.0 and 3.0 has come from the sharp minds of Andrés Colubri and Manindra Moharana. Scott Murray, Jamie Kosoy, and Jon Gacnik have built a wonderful web infrastructure for the project. James Grady is rocking the 3.0 user interface. We thank Florian Jenett for his years of diverse work on the project, including the forums, website, and design. Elie Zananiri and Andreas Schlegel have created the infrastructure for building and documenting contributed libraries, and have spent countless hours curating the lists. Many others have contributed significantly to the project; the precise data is available at https://github.com/processing.

This book grew out of teaching with Processing at UCLA. Chandler McWilliams has been instrumental in defining these classes. Casey thanks the undergraduate students in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA for their energy and enthusiasm. His teaching assistants have been great collaborators in defining how Processing is taught. Hats off to Tatsuya Saito, John Houck, Tyler Adams, Aaron Siegel, Casey Alt, Andrés Colubri, Michael Kontopoulos, David Elliot, Christo Allegra, Pete Hawkes, and Lauren McCarthy.

Jonathan Feinberg began developing Processing.py independently in 2010. Google provided initial support for the development of Python Mode for the Processing IDE in April 2014. The Processing Foundation and Fathom provided additional logistical support. James Gilles made important contributions to the development of Python Mode as well. Work on the Reference, examples, and tutorials was funded in the summer of 2014 in part by the Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology (IDeATe) initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts managed by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. Thank you to Miles Peyton for his work on the documentation and to Golan Levin for guidance and support. We also thank Luca Damasco, who helped bring Processing.py into alignment with the newly released Processing 3 during the 2015 Google Summer of Code, again under guidance from Golan Levin and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU.

The Processing.py project is currently maintained by Jonathan Feinberg and a small team of contributors. You can learn more about Processing.py at the project’s website.

Through founding the Aesthetics and Computation Group (1996–2002) at the MIT Media Lab, John Maeda made all of this possible.