The Nature of Code

The goal of this book is simple. We want to take a look at something that naturally occurs in our physical world, then determine how we can write code to simulate that occurrence.

So then what is this book exactly? Is it a science book? The answer is a resounding no. True, we might examine topics that come from physics or biology, but it won’t be our job to investigate these topics with a particularly high level of academic rigor. Instead, we’re going to glance at scientific concepts and grab the parts that we need in the service of building a particular software example.

Is this an art or design book? I would also say no; after all, we are going to focus on algorithms and their affiliated programming techniques. Sure, the results will all be visual in nature (manifested as animated Processing sketches), but they will exist more as demonstrations of the algorithms and programming techniques themselves, drawn only with simple shapes and grayscale. It is my hope, however, that designers and artists can incorporate all of the material here into their practice to make new, engaging work.

In the end, if this book is anything, it is really just a good old-fashioned programming book. While a scientific topic may seed a chapter (Newtonian physics, cellular growth, evolution) or the results might inspire an artistic project, the content itself will always boil down to the code implementation, with a particular focus on object-oriented programming.

The prerequisite for understanding the material in this book could be stated as: ‘one semester of programming instruction with Processing (including familiarity with object-oriented programming).’ That said, there’s no reason why you couldn’t read this book having learned programming using a different language or development environment. The key here is that you have experience with programming. If you’ve never written any code before, you are going to struggle, because this book assumes knowledge of all the basics.