Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

I'm an experienced programmer in several languages including Java but Processing goes into areas of visual techniques that are outside normal commercial development experience.

I've been looking at using Processing as a teaching aid to introduce programming skills to my son and potentially others of his age (13 yrs). While the online tutorials for Processing are useful, a structured approach to learning was needed.

The "Getting Started" book is excellent for this. I found it filled in several gaps that had been left by the online tutorials. As an intro to Processing, the book really has no equal and I recommend it to anyone coming to Processing, even if, like me, you have previous Java knowledge.

To follow up, if you need greater depth, I suggest "Learning Processing" by Shiffman, and "Processing, A Programming Handbook For Visual Designers and Artists" by Reas and Fry. The online tutorials at Processing.org include several examples from the Shiffman book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

The book is thin and just under 200 pages. It is a good introduction to the Processing language, and is paced somewhat as an introduction to programming as well. Those who already program in other languages will have no problem, and those who haven't will probably be able to pick it up as well.The examples in the book are all short and basic enough for just about anyone to follow. If you know C, C++, Java or any other OO language, you'll have no problem.The last chapter describes how to read serial data from the Arduino and visualize that data with graphics. This is a fun chapter if you're new to microntrollers and using something other than LEDs to monitor their output.My only dislike about the book is the cost and that the information contained in it can pretty much be gleaned from Processing.org and from other books on Processing.[@] lists many books on Processing, but of a more advanced nature. Given that these books go well beyond the scope of "Getting Started with Processing", I would recommend looking at the other books first. If you are very new to programming in general, and want to minimize your investment, then this book is for you.Overall, the book is a quick and straightforward introduction to data visualization, without the boring and complex math one would usually find.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

This book is succeeds at being a book for beginners. The examples are well thought and there is good visualizations throughout.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

This is a short but useful intro to Processing - it starts with the very basics and through a great set of useful and well-illustrated examples takes the user up to a reasonable level of understanding.

It's not an in-depth book, but as the title suggests, is a perfect 'getting started' companion to a first foray into Processsing. It also lightly covers the basics of programming - for loops, functions and so on, so could be a useful primer for someone new to programming.

I really enjoyed working through the book and trying out the examples - it's left me with a keen interest to try out more things with Processing and apply it to my own projects.

Great fun. Perhaps not ideal for experienced coders, but ideal for beginners and those wanting the basics of Processing explained neatly and well.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

I enjoyed receiving and reading this book, especially in light of the other member of this little series, Make Projects, which also contains a great volume about using Arduino, another book which I had the opportunity to review.

I don't think you can get much closer to the source for Processing information than Reas and Fry, who started the project in 2001, and it's very cool read about Processing in the words of the people who created it, in a similar vein to hearing Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, talk about his platform. The book is filled with engaging writing that is technical without being overly technical for most people, and the illustrations are wonderful, the screenshots well-chosen.

Processing is powerful and the book only really manages to scratch the surface of all that it is capable of. One of the coolest thing about Processing that both this book and Banzi's Arduino book touch on is how easy it is to integrate Processing with Arduino, and make interesting and engaging projects out of data and electronics. I would have enjoyed even more examples of this sort of dual usage.

Processing is cool both from the standpoint of a developer looking to become more of a designer, and the designer looking to become more of a developer. This book well suits the latter, but programmers may find themselves wishing for more detail.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Getting Started with Processing:

I was truly delighted to receive my copy of this book and see that it perfectly fills the needs I keep seeing among first-time Processing users. Specifically, users for whom Processing is their first coding environment, who might be coming from other professional fields (design, art, architecture etc.) and who generally find programming syntax to be completely alienating.

This book will walk them through the first hurdles and put them on their way to become productive coders, regardless of their goals. It gently introduces essential syntax (drawing commands and variables), then moves on to cover other topics like user input and importing media. Animation and procedural logic is next, followed by classes and arrays, rounding off with pointers to more advanced topics.

Much of this might seem trivial to experienced coders, indeed they most likely don't need this book. But for the dozens of art and design students I've taught I would practically recommend taking this book to bed.