David Nolen, ITP Resident Researcher
I am the programming Resident Researcher at ITP. My work focues on merging analog and digital artistic practice (feedback loop: Drawing <-> Code). I like building APIs. In a parallel life I do quite a bit of AJAX programming. You can email me at david.nolen@nyu.edu.
A Few Programming Tips
1. Use a decent text editor. This is 2006, text editors have a come a long way to make YOUR life easier. Processing and Arduino rule, but their built-in text editors are teh suck. A great cross platform free one is jEdit. There's even a mode available for Processing and instructions for installing here. For the brave check out Vim or Emacs. Both come in the GUI variety. For those who have cash to blow, TextMate on Mac OS X is pretty sweet.

2. Use a decent text editor. Here's movie using the Processing mode in jEdit (35 secs, that's a lot of saved typing).

3. Practice a lot.

4. Analog practice <-> digital practice. Make drawings, keep a notebook, research.
Office hours
Mon & Wed, 1-3pm, Questions & Conversations welcome.
Help sessions
Come one, come all!
Every Friday 12:30pm-2pm, Room 445
Resources
Books
  • The Natural Way To Draw, Nicolaides: excellent book on the process of drawing. Programming at its most enjoyable is like drawing (except with Errors and Exceptions).
  • ANSI C, 3rd ed., Kernighan & Ritchie: the best book on C. Evar.
  • The C++ Programming Language, Stroustrup: ugh, huge but indispensible.
  • The Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs, Sussman & Abelson: The famous wizard book.
  • Essential Math For Games and Interactive Applications, Verth & Bishop: Handy book for those who want to get their heads around the math. Good to use in conjunction with math texts of your choosing.
  • The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth: One reference to rule them all.
  • OpenGL Distilled, Martz: Excellent overview of the OpenGL API.
  • Learning the UNIX Operating System, Peek & Todino-Gonguet & Strang: Understanding the command line will clarify many aspects of programming.
    • Sites
  • Nehe OpenGL Tutorials: Good place to start. It kinda teaches the wrong way to many things in OpenGL, but hey you gotta start somewhere. It's also nice that there's executable code for almost every major platform.