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EnglishWhich books has Ben Fry written?
Updated
Ben Fry has written or co-written three books: Getting Started with Processing (with Casey Reas), Visualizing Data (O'Reilly, 2007), and Processing (MIT Press). The site presents them as an archive of his work from 1998–2010, so the descriptions below reflect what benfry.com says about each book rather than current editions or availability.
The three books and what each is for
| Book | Role | What the site says |
|---|---|---|
| Getting Started with Processing | Beginner coding guide | Co-written with Casey Reas as a "short and inexpensive guide to writing code for beginners and non-programmers." Heavy on examples and designed to get people started quickly. |
| Visualizing Data | Data visualization process and projects | Written in 2007 for O'Reilly; available at Amazon and elsewhere. Covers the data visualization process (Chapter 1) and walks through projects also found on the site, such as Salary vs. Performance (Chapter 4), Zipdecode (Chapter 6), and Anemone (Chapter 8). |
| Processing | Book about the Processing language and environment | Published by MIT Press; the site notes the second edition is available. Processing is described as an open source programming language and environment for programming images, animation, and interactions, used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. |
How to choose between them
- If you are new to code and want a short, example-driven entry point, start with Getting Started with Processing.
- If you already write code and want to learn the visualization workflow through concrete projects, Visualizing Data is the match—its chapters map directly to projects you can inspect on the site.
- If you want a reference to the Processing language and environment itself, the MIT Press Processing book is the one described for that purpose.
Where to find more
The site points to its writing section for more about Visualizing Data. Note that benfry.com states it has not received regular updates for a long time; it was designed in 2008 and is primarily an archive from 1998–2010, with new work at Fathom. For current editions or purchasing details, check the publisher or retailer pages rather than relying on this archive.