Making Things Talk

26 MAKING THINGS TALK

Processing is a fun language to play with,

because you can make interactive graphics

very quickly. It’s also a simple introduction to Java for

beginning programmers. If you’re a Java programmer

already, you can include Java directly in your Process-

ing programs. Processing is expandable through code

libraries. You’ll be using two of the Processing code

libraries frequently in this book: the serial library and the

networking library.

For more on the syntax of Processing, see the language

reference guide at www.processing.org. To learn more

about programming in Processing, check out Processing:

A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists,

by Casey Reas and Ben Fry (MIT Press, 2007), the creators

of Processing.

BASIC users: If you’ve never used a C-style for-next loop, it can

seem a bit forbidding. What this bit of code does is establish a

variable called myCounter. As long as number is less than or

equal to ten, it executes the instructions in the curly brackets.

myCounter++ tells the program to add one to myCounter

each time through the loop. The equivalent BASIC code is:

for myCounter = 0 to 10

Print myCounter

next

Mac OS X Users: Once you’ve downloaded and installed

Processing, there’s an extra step you’ll need to take that will

make the projects in this book that use Processing possible.

for (int myCounter = 0; myCounter <=10; myCounter++) {

print