Week 1
This week’s highlights:
- Joel rambled on a bit about what computer science and programming are and are not.
- We defined mathematical functions, a few other important math terms (the domain and range of a function), and contrasted them with less abstract and more difficult to describe functions (including that most-difficult-to-describe function, the human, whose workings were pithily summarized as transforming food into babies).
- We downloaded the Processing environment and made some simple programs.
Reading
Required
Chapters 1-3 in Getting Started with Processing. Run the examples as you go through. Make a note and skim if you find a section you have trouble with. The examples can be loaded directly from the Processing environment (go through menus File/Examples/GettingStartedBook).
Optional
Code Complete, chapter 2. This describes some of the metaphors for programming I probably screwed up in class.
Homework
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Write a program to draw a picture that uses at least 5 different functions from the Processing library. Some suggestions: look under the 2D Primitives and Color sections.
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Take 2 examples from chapter 2 or 3 in Getting Started with Processing, and modify them. Suggestions: change shapes by replacing one function call with a different one, or by changing function parameter values; change colors by using the background(), fill(), or stroke() functions.