The objective of this book is to educate Flash developers in another somewhat competitive programming language and environment, called Processing. Its focus is to advance software literacy within the visual arts, and it will be useful for people who want to program with images, animation, and interactivity. In contrast to the proprietary Flash, Processing, based on a library of Java applets, is open source. It runs on multiple platforms and on several browsers.

According to http://processing.org, Processing is a programming language, a development environment, and an online community. Processing runs on browsers that support the Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5) Canvas element. The widely seen HTML5 examples use JavaScript as the scripting language; however, Processing is often used for rendering.

In addition to people involved in electronic arts and visual design, several departments with a “teach students to program” mission have adopted Processing. It is rather easy to use Processing to learn to produce visual kinds of results, which are motivational to students.

Greenberg has written this book with a specific audience in mind: experienced Flash developers. According to the author, this book would also be good for non-Flash practitioners who need an intermediate-level Processing book. His tone is very informal, the very opposite of the often pompous and stilted language of computer science authors. For example, the title of chapter 5 is “I Like Particle Engines.” He assumes the audience already knows basic programming, but he does use many examples. The first three chapters describe the Processing language and theory. In the first chapter, Greenberg provides an overview of Processing, along with comparisons with Flash’s ActionScript. In the next chapters, he moves on to actually using the Processing application programming interface (API) with some examples. The rest of the book contains complete Processing projects.

I have some familiarity with Adobe Flash, and found Greenberg’s book to be easy to read with worthwhile examples. I think he met his objective.