I’m pleased to announce that my new programming with Processing book will be released this August (by the end of the month). You can pre-order the book from Amazon, download a sample chapter from the web site, and, yes, even become a fan of the book on facebook (since that’s what all the 35 year olds are doing these days.)

A few things I’d like to say about the book:

My goal for “Learning Processing” was to write something for the complete and total programming beginner. If you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, but want to get started creating your own digital media tools then I wrote this book for you. There are several other wonderful Processing books out there and I hope mine will complement them nicely. A special thanks to Casey, Ben, and Ira who kept encouraging and inspiring me as their books were being published.

The book is also geared towards the teacher. It’s not my belief that such a person will necessarily learn any new skills from the book (assuming they have a programming background), however, my hope is that the book will encourage and help facilitate the teaching of programming. It is structured with 10 lessons (complete with examples and exercises) and can act as a ready-made syllabus for a beginner interactive media / programming class. In fact, the book is modeled exactly on ITP’s Introduction to Computational Media course.

The first half of the book is all fundamentals: pixels, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, objects, arrays. The second half is an introduction to select advanced topics: 3D, images, video, data, sound, etc. (download full table of contents). And although the web site is currently just a splash page, it’s my intention to make available all the examples (and exercise answers) at the site. The full site should launch in the next few weeks (a big thanks to Rich Hauck who is helping to build the site.)

If anyone is interested in teaching with the book come this fall, please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be happy to answer any questions. It’s also my hope that this book can teach programming to high school students, however, I don’t have as much experience in this area. . . but if anyone is looking to try it out with younger students, please let me know and I would love to help.