RaphaelJS

Preface

I once heard programming described as a way to “express your ideas through a computer.” To me, that morsel of wisdom encapsulates everything that is wonderful and awful about writing code: it gives us the vocabulary to work through our ideas and then lays bare the limits of our ingenuity.

If everyone had the same sorts of ideas, we would only need one programming language. The quotation above comes from a book about Ruby, which many people will fervently argue is the finest language around (often long after you would have preferred to change the subject).

But of course, people have all sorts of wild ideas that cannot be properly served by one language. This book, which is about the JavaScript library called Raphael, is for a specific subset of human ideas: visual ones.

If you’re a person who thinks visually and wants to learn to code, there’s a good chance you’ve been frustrated by efforts to learn classical programming languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, or even JavaScript itself, the programming language that is embedded in every web browser. Most tutorials tend to start you out with printing words to the screen, writing functions to print more words to the screen, and, if you’re lucky, maybe branching into printing numbers to the screen by the end of the first lesson.

In RaphaelJS, we’ll be painting the screen with all manner of shapes and colors, animating them through space and time, and bending them to our will (via the tyranny of our mouse and fingers). Every example and ...