This is Jim Bumgardner, of krazydad.com. I’ve been writing and teaching a lot about Processing, lately, so I thought it would be good to start this blog. My krazydad website is more oriented towards puzzles, and the puzzle fans probably are scratching their heads about all this Processing stuff.

There will be material here aimed at beginner, intermediate, and advanced Processing programmers. The majority of these sketches will work in both Processing.js (as they do on this website) and the stand-alone version of Processing. I’ll try to avoid sketches that don’t work in Processing.js.

Got any questions about Processing? Send them to me, and I’ll try to address them in a future blog entry.

Processing is a wonderful language for first-time programmers. It is also great for recreational programming, which is a wonderful kind of programming for learning — I find it is much better to play at it than to work at it.

A common mistake beginners make is to try to do very large ambitious projects — they are learning to program as a means to accomplishing the project. This is admirable, but it is also very hard to accomplish. I learned my craft by writing lots of small programs that did very simple things. I found this method worked very well. If I had been working on a large complicated project, I would have gotten frustrated and quit. Instead, I kept playing. Eventually I gained the skills I needed to work on more complex projects. I suggest you do the same! If you are a beginner, and you have a large project, or even a medium sized one, put it away for now.

Take a few days, and play!