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contains a “Planning” and a “Program” section. The “Planning” section is where I
describe my thought process. Programs do not spring into existence—at least for
me—not like Mozart composing a symphony, which was said to emerge all at once from
his mind. It is an iterative process for most of us. This section contains a table indicating
the relationship of the functions. The “Program” section includes a table with one
column for code and another column with an explanation of that line of code. These
tables are long and are not meant to be read as poetry or fine literature. Instead, skip
around. Use the function relationship table. If you download the code and try it out, you
can use this section to improve your understanding of the program. The most critical
step is to make changes, and I provide suggestions in the “How to Make This Your Own”
section. This set of sections is repeated for each example.
A section titled “Things to Look Up” will contain a list of Processing features related
to the ones described in the chapter. Processing is a large language and it is growing. I
can show you only a small subset of the features and each feature is used in one way,
perhaps using default values. You can and should consult other references to learn
more. You can look things up in multiple ways. For example, you can go to the web
site at https://processing.org/reference/ and just keep that open. Alternatively, if
you want to look up how to draw a rectangle in Processing, it can be efficient to enter
“processing.org rectangle” into Google (or another search engine) or the address field of
browsers such as Chrome to retrieve a list of possible sites. It is best to use “processing.
org” because processing is a common English word. You can try “Processing rectangle,”
but you will need to skip over some sites that have nothing to do with the Processing
language.
Remember that the goal of this chapter is not to teach you how to make my
examples, from peanut-shaped bald men to certain games to rotating 3D cubes, but to
help you understand how to make your own programs! Make small changes and then
large changes. Make your own programs! Chapters will close with two more sections: a
brief review, “What You Learned,” and “What’s Next.”
The book also has an Appendix describing what is called ProcessingJS.This is a way
to publish most types of Processing sketches on the Web. It also makes use of examples.
You are welcome to look at the chapters in any order but later examples do depend
on an understanding of concepts introduced earlier. Moreover, because one of the
main techniques of programming is to reuse code, there are many instances of later
examples copying parts of earlier examples. Do not be concerned: The tables in the
inTRoduCTion