In the fall of 2001, I wandered into the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, having not written a line of code since the early 1980s, when I’d done some experimenting in BASIC on an AppleII+. There, in a first semester course entitled “Introduction to Computational Media,” I discovered programming. ITP has been my home ever since. Without the inspiration and support of the department, this book would never have been written.

Red Burns, the department’s founder, encouraged and championed me for my first ten years at ITP. Sadly, she passed away in August 2013; this book is dedicated to her legacy. Dan O’Sullivan was the first to suggest that I try a course in Processing, giving me a reason to start putting together programming tutorials. Shawn Van Every sat next to me in the office throughout the majority of the writing of this book’s first edition, providing helpful suggestions, code, and a great deal of moral support along the way. Tom Igoe’s work with physical computing provided inspiration for this book, and he was particularly helpful as a resource while putting together examples on network and serial communication. And it was Clay Shirky who I can thank for stopping me in the hall one day to tell me I should write a book in the first place. Clay also provided a great deal of feedback on early drafts of the first edition.

All of my fellow computational media teachers at ITP have provided helpful suggestions and feedback along the way: Danny Rozin (the inspiration behind Chapters 15 and 16), Mimi Yin, Lauren McCarthy (whose innovative work developing p5.js has opened my eyes up to the world ofJavaScript and the web), Amit Pitaru (who helped in particular with the first edition’s chapter on sound), Nancy Lewis, James Tu, Mark Napier, Chris Kairalla, Luke Dubois, Roopa Vasudevan, Matt Parker, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and Jim Moore (who was my teacher for that first semester course!). My gratitude goes to the following ITP full-time faculty members for continuously offering their insight and fortitude throughout the writing of this book: Marianne Petit, Nancy Hechinger, Marina Zurkow, Katherine Dillon, Eric Rosenthal, Gabe Barcia-Colombo, and Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis. And my full appreciation goes to the rest of the faculty and staff at ITP who have made this possible: George Agudow, Edward Gordon, Midori Yasuda, Rob Ryan, John Duane, Marlon Evans, Tony Tseng, Matthew Berger, Karl Ward, and Megan Demarest.

The students of ITP, too numerous to mention, have been an amazing source of feedback, having used much of the material in this book in trial runs for various courses. I have stacks of pages with notes scrawled in the margins, as well as a vast archive of email exchanges with corrections, comments, and generous words of encouragement, all of which were integral to the development of this book’s ideas.

I’m also indebted to the energetic and supportive community of Processing programmers and artists. I’d probably be out of a job if it weren’t for Casey Reas and Ben Fry who created Processing, to say the least. I’ve learned half of what I know simply from reading through the Processing source code; the elegant simplicity of the Processing language, website, and IDE has made programming accessible and fun for me and all of my students. I’ve received advice, suggestions, and comments from many Processing programmers including Andres Colubri, Scott Murray, Florian Jennet, Elie Zananiri, Scott Garner, Manindra Mohanara, Jer Thorp, Marius Watz, Robert Hodgin, Golan Levin, Tom Carden, Karsten Schmidt, Ariel Malka, Burak Arikan, and Ira Greenberg. The following teachers were also helpful in test- driving early versions of the first edition in their courses: Hector Rodriguez, Keith Lam, Liubo Borissov, Rick Giles, Amit Pitaru, David Maccarella, Jeff Gray, and Toshitaka Amaoka.

Peter Kirn and Douglas Edric Stanley provided extraordinarily detailed comments and feedback during the first edition’s technical review process; the book is a great deal better than it would have been without their efforts. Demetrie Tyler did a tremendous job working on the original visual design of the cover and interior of the book. And a thanks to David Hindman, who helped me organize the original screenshots and diagrams. My thanks to Rich Hauck who developed the website for the first edition.

I’d also like to thank everyone at Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier who worked on producing the first edition: Gregory Chalson, Tiffany Gasbarrini, Jeff Freeland, Danielle Monroe, Matthew Cater, Michele Cronin, Denise Penrose, and Mary James.

For the second edition, I am incredibly grateful to everyone at Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier and O’Reilly who were supportive of my choice in using the Atlas publishing platform (https://atlas.oreilly.com/) to create this book.

Using Atlas allowed me to have a more fluid process and involve lots of contributors with feedback and advice. Wilm Thoben, Seth Kranzler, and Jason Sigal all provided sound feedback and edits on Chapter 20: Sound. Mark Sawula, Yong Bakos, and Kasper Kasperman read PDFs as they were generated and gave excellent critique and feedback. J. David Eisenberg acted as a de-facto technical editor, offering numerous and terrific suggestions for improving explanations and examples. A special thanks goes to Johanna Hedva who copy-edited almost the entire book during elaborate layout transformations. In addition, several key content changes exist because of her keen eye.

From Elsevier, Todd Green went above and beyond in working out the details of the complex collaboration with O’Reilly and Atlas. Thanks also to Charlie Kent and Debbie Clark for their help in facilitating production details. I’d like to say, in general, that the Atlas platform and the team at O’Reilly are terrific to work with: This book has all sorts of strange layout quirks, and it’s amazing that the entire end product is generated from an HTML file using CSS and XSLT for layout. Thanks to Andrew Odewahn, Rune Madsen, Sanders Kleinfeld, Dan Fauxsmith, and Adam Zaremba for giving me early access to Atlas and teaching me its magic. Thanks to Rebecca Demarest for her help and advice with illustrations, and Ron Bilodeau for his feats of CSS. Last, but the opposite of least, I’d like to thank Kristen Brown who listened thoughtfully to every, single, tiny detail I asked about and applied the exact skills I lacked, knowing how to prioritize and keep a schedule to make sure this book actually met its deadline. You can see the scale of her contribution in this book’s Github repo’s pulse.

Most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Aliki Caloyeras; my children, Elias and Olympia; my parents, Doris and Bernard Shiffman; and my brother, Jonathan Shiffman, for their moral support, advice, and encouragement, not only in the second edition of this book, but in everything else.