This page has books (online and physical) and resources that are useful for the course.

Textbooks (Available online through ANU Library)

There are several textbooks available online through the ANU Library on p5.js and creative coding, these three cover similar topics to this course and are a good resource:

  • Make: Getting Started with p5.js. Lauren McCarthy, Casey Reas, and Ben Fry. 2015. (link)

  • Learn JavaScript with p5.js: Coding for Visual Learners. Engin Arslan. 2018. (link)

  • Coding Art: The Four Steps to Creative Programming with the Processing Language. Mathias Funk and Yu Zhang. 2021. (link)

And now here are two extra books that you might like to look at for extending your knowledge beyond the requirements of the course.

The following book is for those who would like more in-depth knowledge of computer graphics, it’s a free textbook distributed online. A full treatment of computer graphics is beyond the scope of COMP1720, but after working in p5 you might have an appetite for more!

  • Introduction to Computer Graphics. David J. Eck. 2021. link.

And this book is a typical JavaScript textbook exploring all of that langauge’s features and how it can be used in modern web programming. This goes way beyond what we need or expect in COMP1720, but if you really want to know how to use asynchronous programming features in JS, then this might be the place to look.

  • JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 7th Edition. David Flanagan. 2020 link

Art and Interaction Bibliography

Charles maintains a bibliography of useful resources about interactive computer art and music: https://cpmpercussion.github.io/art-and-interaction-bibliography/

This list is especially useful for figuring out “recent developments” in art and interaction computing.

The repo is here so if you want to add something, make a pull request!

p5js.org

This is the main p5js website, and there’s lots of good info there:

  • the p5js reference has all the details on every function and variable you’ll need to care about in the p5 library
  • the p5js examples page is a good place to see how different things can be done using p5
  • the p5js learn page has some useful tutorials and guides

MDN JavaScript reference

The Mozilla Developer Network is the best place to get free online documentation, tutorials and guides on all things web development.

Since this course is all in JavaScript then the JavaScript reference homepage is probably the best place to start, but you can’t go wrong exploring other parts of the MDN (e.g. their references & guides section)

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