Make Art with Python
$14.99
Minimum price
$14.99
Suggested price

Make Art with Python

Programming for Creative People

About the Book

Make Art with Python teaches programming for creative people.

If you've struggled with learning programming in the past, or have thought to yourself that you'd never learn to program, this is the book for you.

It takes a non-traditional approach to teaching computer science and programming through visual programs.

Most programming books or courses focus on math problems and text manipulation as ways to teach the fundamentals of computer programming. Instead, Make Art with Python focuses on building creative, visual programs to learn the basics of computer programming and computer science.

If you've never considered yourself a "math" person, or you consider yourself a language, or visual first learner, the exercises will quickly get you up and running. You'll be writing your first program right from the beginning, and each chapter will bring about a new, fundamental insight about the process of programming.

About the Author

KP Kaiser
Kirk Kaiser

KP Kaiser is a backend and creative developer who primarily works in Python.

Previously, he was the lead backend developer at Triller, scaling to the app from zero to millions of users.

Before Triller, he wrote the backend for a social app called Somebody which was also in the Top 100 free apps for the App Store, won an award for a site built for GE, helped design a lighting control system, and ran the infrastructure for a large eCommerce company.

He also developed an iPhone app that explored tracking the human mind during meditation using raw physiological measurements. The first product available from these experiments was Buddha Mind, an iPhone app which incorporated a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor to measure and track your Heart Rate Variability during meditation

He skateboards when not programming or shooting photos. In another life he hiked the first half of the Appalachian Trail, lived in the Panamanian rain forest, and backpacked most of Central America.

About the Contributors

Dan Foster
Dan Foster

Editor

Franco Castillo
Franco Castillo

Cover Artist

Mike Sliva
Mike Sliva

Artist

Table of Contents

  • Introduction - Learning to Program with Art and Python
    • Why Art
    • Why Python
    • The Creative Process of Programming
    • The Journey of Becoming A Programmer
    • No “Right Way”
  • Chapter One: A Tutorial Introduction
    • Getting Python
    • The Terminal: A Program to Control Programs
    • Writing Our First Program
    • How the Development Cycle Works
    • The Editor: A Place for Writing Programs
  • Chapter Two: Computational Thinking
    • The Loop
    • The Variable
    • Python Data Types
    • Control Flow
    • Syntax
    • Bringing It All Together
  • Chapter Three: Writing Our First Graphics Program
    • Drawing Our First Pixel
    • How to Read Our Code
    • Editing Our Code
    • Turning Pixels into a Line with a Loop
    • Changing Our Line’s Direction
    • Flipping Our Diagonal Line
    • A Final Challenge
  • Chapter Four: Functions Are The Building Blocks of Programs
    • From Pixels to Lines, Putting the Fun in Function
    • The Mechanics of Writing A Function
    • Testing Your Functions as You Go
    • Drawing Randomness with Our New Function
    • Combining Our Functions for New Effects
  • Chapter Five: Reading the User’s Mind With Input
    • Do What the Humans Tell You
    • Grabbing the User’s Input
    • Lists Are Lines of Variables, All in A Row
    • Creating a List, Adding Things to Your List
  • Chapter Six: More Playing with Loops
    • Drawing with Our New Cursor
    • Drawing with Our New Cursor
    • Looping a Fade
    • Making Our Fade into a Wave
    • Fading Colors to Make Rainbows
    • More Experimenting
  • Chapter Seven: Inventing Ideas with Classes
    • Drawing in New Ways
    • Making Your Ideas Part of the Language
    • Creating Our Line Class
    • Planning Your Class Design
    • Rethinking How We Draw
    • Drawing with the Mouse
    • Cleaning Up Our Code with Class
  • Chapter Eight: Inventing New Ways to Draw with Shapes
    • Exploring Pygame’s Drawing Methods
    • Giving Our Class New Features
    • Colorizing Our Lines
  • Chapter Nine: Playing with Files
    • Setting Up Our Directories
    • Reading Options from the Command Line
    • Using IPython to Inspect New Libraries
    • Saving Our Drawings with Pickle
    • Adding Undo to Our Program
    • Using Time to Add Delay to Our Undo
    • Protecting Ourselves from Errors
  • Chapter Ten: Painting with Images
    • Dissecting an Image
    • Manipulating Whole Images
    • Making Mirror Images
    • Creating Geometric Images
    • Turning Our Images into Videos
  • Chapter Eleven: Drawing Infinities
    • The Three Regular Polygons that Tesselate the Plane
    • Drawing A Centered Triangle
    • Checking the Distance of Triangles
    • Drawing Our Flipped Triangles in the Right Places
    • Making Our Tesselations More Interesting
    • Tesselating Hexagons
    • Colorizing Our Hexagons
  • Chapter Twelve: Inventing Interactive Tesselations
    • Survey the Problem Space
    • Discover the Rules
    • Draw It First
    • Make It Interactive
    • Making a Plan of Attack (For Code)
    • Drawing a Square From Scratch
    • Adding Midpoints To Our Square’s Lines
    • Selecting A Point
    • Finding the Opposite Point in the Square
    • Bringing It All Together to Draw
    • Tesselating Our New Shape
  • Chapter Thirteen: Exporting Our Tesselations for Print
    • Rendering Vector Graphics
    • Adjusting Our Tesselation’s Thickness
    • Creating Glitches in Our Tessellations
    • Colorizing our Tesselations with Inkscape
    • Exploring Further

Causes Supported

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Defending your civil liberties in a digital world.
https://www.eff.org/

Based in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to protect fundamental rights regardless of technology.

From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990—well before the Internet was on most people's radar—and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.

We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub