The Nature of Code | Hacker News Reader

The Nature of Code

natureofcode.com

193 pointsbpierre15 comments

This is a great resource by Daniel Shiffman. For those who don't know, The Nature of Code was a kickstarter project[0] (he also wrote "Learning Processing" a while ago), and I've contributed to it for the following reason: I've been around people in the arts field a lot, and when it comes to teaching them programming from scratch, nothing beats processing. I'm a huge fan of other languages for my day-to-day use, but for teaching people who have never seen code before, processing is fantastic. (it might not be a coincidence that Daniel works in a Fine Arts department)

There's incredible power in being able to immediately visualize any data structure with such ease. You only need to understand that there's a "setup" function, and a "run-all-the-time-while-this-window-is-open" function (draw), and tell people to jam whatever code they want in there, it will be executed from top to bottom. The result? Usually, incredibly messy code with gigantic nested loops everywhere - but students were invariably learning things, and once in a while, having fun too. Books like these are really important because they give learners a starting point, something to mess around with - which is usually all they need to get started.

This looks great, I'll be going through it soon.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shiffman/the-nature-of-...

Not a fine arts department, but rather a school for creative technologists: http://itp.nyu.edu.

Right, though it's part of the "Tisch School of the Arts".

The great thing about this book is that it's not just for Processing.

It has the most accessible descriptions of vector fields, genetic algorithms, neural networks (etc) that I've seen anywhere.

What this website lacks is the information commonly found on the back of the book cover: what this book is about?

It's in the 'Preface' chapter: http://natureofcode.com/book/preface/

Indeed, thanks. It's strange, that link on the homepage, which invites to start reading skips the preface.

Wonderful book! On L-systems: The Sierpinski triangle is used in fractal antennas which dramatically improve signal strength. There is a program called Terragen which procedurally generates entire planets with atmosphere and vegetation, in 1:1 scale. https://vimeo.com/3611863

Is anyone else having trouble scrolling by dragging the scrollbar when at the top of the page?

what browser / os? you can file bug report here: https://github.com/shiffman/natureofcode.com/issues

Me too. I am on Chrome on OSX 10.9.3.

Previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709551

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5153895

this book in video form: http://vimeo.com/channels/natureofcode

The videos are awesome, never a dull moment. Daniel is a real character and presents the material well.

Processing.org has a lot of examples of the variety of art projects made with processing.

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