Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain. // processing.org

If you’re already familiar with programming, it’s important to understand how Processing differs from other development environments and languages. The Processing project encourages a style of work that builds code quickly, understanding that either the code will be used as a quick sketch or that ideas are being tested before developing a final project. This could be misconstrued as software engineering heresy. Perhaps we’re not far from “hacking,” but this is more appropriate for the roles in which Processing is used. Why force students or casual programmers to learn about graphics contexts, threading, and event handling methods before they can show something on the screen that interacts with the mouse? The same goes for advanced developers; why should they always need to start with the same two pages of code whenever they begin a project? // Ben Fry, Visualizing Data

Read all Processing-related articles on hyperRitual.

Some Processing resources:

• processing.org
• processingblogs.org
• processinghacks.com
• OpenProcessing
• Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects
• makingthingstalk.com | blogs, errata, etc.
• Getting Started with Processing
• Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists
• Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art
• Visualizing Data
• Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction
• Algorithms for Visual Design Using the Processing Language
• Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks