Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design

This book is a portal into a universe of digital art, creative technology and computational design. Whether you are a student, teacher, artist or explorer, you will find a depth of knowledge within this book that will take you to new places. Can't recommend it highly enough.

This is a wonderful text that is an essential entry point for anyone looking to get into creative coding. This book will also be inspirational for anyone already into creative coding.

It's a great resource for both teachers and artists. Interesting assignments with great references.

Underwhelming.

Nice layout, great artists, and prompts included

This handbook is primarily intended for educators who are assembling a syllabus for a university or high school course in new-media art or computational design. It emphasizes "what's worth making and why", rather than "how". While this book may also be suitable for motivated auto-didacts, it's not an introductory text for first-time creative coders. If that's what you're looking for, consider Reas & Fry's "Processing", Shiffman's "Learning Processing", McCarthy's "Getting Started with p5.js", Parrish's "Getting Started with Processing.py", or Gross's "Generative Design". Some readers may find it odd that there is no code printed in the book itself. Instead, the authors have published a comprehensive code repository online. Sample solutions for the book's 200+ exercises can be found at the GitHub URL printed on the book's back cover. This trove of free, open-source code includes solutions in three different programming languages (JavaScript, Java, and Python). In the Introduction, the authors explain that putting code online allows support for a wider range of creative-coding toolkits, and can help avoid the code becoming obsolete.

I've really been enjoying “Code as a Creative Medium”. It’s ostensibly a book for teaching creative coding, with big-name teachers, like Daniel Shiffman and Lauren McCarthy. Pedagogy is often just repackaged history, so art pedagogy tends use an ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny approach. For example, you learn about sine waves and delays first because those were only tools available to the first electronic musicians. Organization by history often results in either fetishization of old technology or an overemphasis on novelty. Either results in a certain kind of emptiness that pervades a lot of contemporary digital art. This pedagogy, however, is organized by concept, which is refreshing and liberating because it frees us from history. The chapter on visual control of sound includes both Iannis Xenakis and Jace Clayton, who share a conceptual space even though their work is separated by 35 years of art technology evolution. And even though “code” is in the title there’s no code - not even pseudocode. That’s an important reminder: before you begin to fill your new Visual Studio document, go for a long walk alone and in silence, to figure out what it is you want to do.

As a catalogue of digital art projects I would have given this 5 stars. I bought it to teach and it gives great suggestions, exercises and allied material. It just doesn't give coded examples. The latter is kind of necessary at times just even for reader comprehension or as an illustrative learning example. If you want inspiration and use it as a catalogue then it has 5 starts from me but at $35 I was expecting more. Kindle books at a tenth of the price were replete with examples and code but light on a catalogue survey. Great value if it was significantly cheaper around $10 kindle / $20 print.

A book with ready to use assignments for your classes. Great if you conduct Creative Coding classes for the first time. For a seasoned lecturer only the final chapter with interviews is interesting.

Super! Tolles Buch über Creative Coding!

Awesome good for an artist like me. It help me a lot to find ideas and good practice to develop projects further.

A very interesting book, well documented and visually appealing for anyone interested in acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the various themes, approaches, formats and authors in digital art.

Yes!