Make Art with Python: Programming for Creative People

Make Art with Python was written to teach creative people the joy of computer programming.If you've tried to learn programming with traditional books or online courses, only to get stuck, this book is for you. With step by step, visual programs, we teach the fundamentals of computer programming so creative people can understand.Make Art with Python teaches programming for creative people. If you've struggled with learning programming in the past, or have thought to yourself that you'd never learn to program, this is the book for you. It takes a non-traditional approach to teaching computer science and programming through visual programs. Most programming books or courses focus on math problems and text manipulation as ways to teach the fundamentals of computer programming. Instead, Make Art with Python focuses on building creative, visual programs to learn the basics of computer programming and computer science. In this book, we’ll use the main Python interpreter, also called Cython. As an interpreter, Python reads our programs line by line executing each instruction in order from the files we write. Indeed, we can also type out our programs directly into Python, and have our programs run as we type. For a beginner, this makes starting with Python less frustrating, and makes making mistakes less costly. Python has also been around for a long time, receiving decades of continuous improvements from some of the best programmers in the world. Because of this, it’s also got over a hundred thousand “libraries”, or programs which extend the capabilities of the Python program itself. Libraries can connect our Python programs to the internet, write AI, draw images, control 3D printers, direct robots, and more. Each of them just gives us a new set of tools to incorporate to our programs. Finally, Python is a very easy programming language to read, compared to most languages. At first, looking at Python code might seem confusing, but there are very simple rules for Python code relative to other languages. It uses a lot of white spaces to designate what parts of the code belong to each other. This makes reading other people’s code easier, and gives plenty of other, open source code to look at if we get stuck. If you've never considered yourself a "math" person, or you consider yourself a language, or visual first learner, the exercises will quickly get you up and running. You'll be writing your first program right from the beginning, and each chapter will bring about a new, fundamental insight about the process of programming.