On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ […] I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)
In my first post about generative art, I dumped a lot of Javascript on you with only a basic explanation of how it works, and more recently I have given up trying to explain it at all under the theory that most of the people reading these posts are more interested in the art rather than the programming behind it. Also, including a Javascript course here would make for some very, very long articles!
If you have been trying to follow along with what I have been doing and need a good tutorial in the basics of programming in Javascript, you may be interested in “ Eloquent Javascript ” by Marijn Haverbeke. I recently ran across this book and found it to be a clear, concise introduction to programming in general.
The book can be read on-line or downloaded in any of several digital formats for your favorite ebook reader for free, or purchased from Amazon . Purchasing the book helps support the author, and you get an additional chapter not found on-line. The book is licensed under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license , meaning you can do pretty much whatever you like with it as long as it is noncommercial, and you provide proper credit.
Check it out if you want to dive deeper into Javascript!
But wait! There’s more!
Any of you out there producing creative content (and I know that’s probably all of you) may be interested in the Creative Commons , which I mentioned above as providing the license for the book. The Creative Commons develops ways to make it easy to share your work and find other works that you can legally reuse.
From their FAQ :
Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms; those who want to make creative uses of works; and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis. Our vision is to help others realize the full potential of the internet.