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 wh

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-code-book-project https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shiffman/the-nature-of-...