This book gives students and experienced programmers a way to see coding as an art and themselves as artists whose personal views, experiences, and ways of thinking can make their programs better for themselves and their users.
This book shows in a good-humored and sympathetic way how the artistic and practical sides of programming are the same, delving into the methods of coding, the history of art, and the ways in which artists and audiences interact and benefit each other.
Not confined to a single language or style of coding, this book provides a widely applicable framework for people to learn what languages and styles work best for them at present and as the field evolves. It can be used as a classroom text or for personal study and enrichment.
Section I: Everything Humans Do Is Art
1. All Art Everywhere since Time Began
2. What Programming Does Best
3. User as Audience
4. Programmer as Artist
5. The Five Programming Actions as Techniques
6. Languages as Materials
Section II: Too Much Information
7. Information Theory
8. Human Perception and Measurement
9. Data as Information at a Distance
10. Data Structures as Architecture and Furniture for Data
11. Functions and Objects
12. Interfaces: Creating Shapes, Flows, and Empty Spaces
13. Practice, Experimentation, and Playing with Possibility
14. Artworks and Human Needs
15. Combining Coding with Other Arts
Section III: Foreground: Artist’s Life
16. What Is Needed?
17. What Do You Enjoy Making?
18. Working Alone
19. Working with Others
20. Clients and Audiences
21. Support Network
22. Making Money
23. Intellectual Property
24. Art as Life
Biography
Richard Garfinkle is a computer programmer and author of science and math popularizations and science fiction and fantasy novels. He is married to a visual artist. Richard attended the University of Chicago and majored in mathematics. He has been programming since the era of punch cards and paper tapes.
