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. Table of Contents Introduction - Learning to Program with Art and Python Why Art Why Python The Creative Process of Programming The Journey of Becoming A Programmer No ``Right Way'' Chapter One: A Tutorial Introduction Getting Python The Terminal: A Program to Control Programs Writing Our First Program How the Development Cycle Works The Editor: A Place for Writing Programs Chapter Two: Computational Thinking The Loop The Variable Python Data Types Control Flow Syntax Bringing It All Together Chapter Three: Writing Our First Graphics Program Drawing Our First Pixel How to Read Our Code Editing Our Code Turning Pixels into a Line with a Loop Changing Our Line's Direction Flipping Our Diagonal Line A Final Challenge Chapter Four: Functions Are The Building Blocks of Programs From Pixels to Lines, Putting the Fun in Function The Mechanics of Writing A Function Testing Your Functions as You Go Drawing Randomness with Our New Function Combining Our Functions for New Effects Chapter Five: Reading the User's Mind With Input Do What the Humans Tell You Grabbing the User's Input Lists Are Lines of Variables, All in A Row Creating a List, Adding Things to Your List Chapter Six: More Playing with Loops Drawing with Our New Cursor Drawing with Our New Cursor Looping a Fade Making Our Fade into a Wave Fading Colors to Make Rainbows More Experimenting Chapter Seven: Inventing Ideas with Classes Drawing in New Ways Making Your Ideas Part of the Language Creating Our Line Class Planning Your Class Design Rethinking How We Draw Drawing with the Mouse Cleaning Up Our Code with Class Chapter Eight: Inventing New Ways to Draw with Shapes Exploring Pygame's Drawing Methods Giving Our Class New Features Colorizing Our Lines Chapter Nine: Playing with Files Setting Up Our Directories Reading Options from the Command Line Using IPython to Inspect New Libraries Saving Our Drawings with Pickle Adding Undo to Our Program Using Time to Add Delay to Our Undo Protecting Ourselves from Errors Chapter Ten: Painting with Images Dissecting an Image Manipulating Whole Images Making Mirror Images Creating Geometric Images Turning Our Images into Videos Chapter Eleven: Drawing Infinities The Three Regular Polygons that Tesselate the Plane Drawing A Centered Triangle Checking the Distance of Triangles Drawing Our Flipped Triangles in the Right Places Making Our Tesselations More Interesting Tesselating Hexagons Colorizing Our Hexagons Chapter Twelve: Inventing Interactive Tesselations Survey the Problem Space Discover the Rules Draw It First Make It Interactive Making a Plan of Attack (For Code) Drawing a Square From Scratch Adding Midpoints To Our Square's Lines Selecting A Point Finding the Opposite Point in the Square Bringing It All Together to Draw Tesselating Our New Shape Chapter Thirteen: Exporting Our Tesselations for Print Rendering Vector Graphics Adjusting Our Tesselation's Thickness Creating Glitches in Our Tessellations Colorizing our Tesselations with Inkscape Exploring Further 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. 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.