Jump Start Node.js – A well-written guide for learning Node.js quickly – #programming #bookreview

 Jump Start Node.js
Don Nguyen
(SitePoint – paperback, Kindle)

Don Nguyen’s well-written Node.js book has been in print for a few months and is an excellent text for learning how to put Node.js to work in fast, scalable real-time web applications.

You should have some experience with JavaScript before tackling Node.js. But Nguyen says a “server-side engineer who uses another language such as PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, or .NET” can pick up enough JavaScript from his book to get a good feel for its syntax and idiosyncratic features.

What I like most about the book is how it  jumps right into developing a dynamic working Node.js application that you deploy to a production server. The project is a real-time stock market trading engine that streams live prices into a web browser. Along the way, you learn how to set up and use a NoSQL database (with MongoDB), you learn some functional programming techniques, and you work with Ajax, Express, Mocha, Socket.io, Backbone.js, Twitter Bootstrap, GitHub and Heroku.

The author covers a lot of ground, with clear code examples and good explanations, in just 154 pages. “The main goal of this book,” he notes, “is to transfer the skill set rather than the actual project into the real world. There is a narrow domain of ‘hard’ real-time applications such as a stock exchange where specialized software and hardware are required because microseconds count. However, there is a much larger number of ‘soft’ real-time applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay where microseconds are of small consequence. This is Node.js’s speciality, and you’ll understand how to build these types of applications by the end of this book.”

Note: If you are a Windows user, you will have to install Cygwin before you can start using the Mocha testing framework on page 23. If you use Mac OS X, you will need to have the Xcode Command Line Tools installed. More information related to the book can be found at this SitePoint forum.

– Si Dunn

Introducing Erlang – A gentle, effective guide to a challenging programming language – #bookreview

Introducing Erlang
Simon St. Laurent
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

Erlang has come a long way since it began its odd life in the 1980s as a programming language for telephone switching systems, specifically Swedish-made, Ericsson telephone switching systems.

Today, the language and its Open Telecom Platform libraries are gaining new converts among serious practitioners of functional programming. Many of them likewise are drawn to the built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.

“The broad shift from single computers to networked and distributed systems of multiprocessor-based computing gives the Erlang environment a tremendous advantage over practically every other environment out there,” author Simon St. Laurent contends. “More and more of the computing world is starting to face exactly the challenges that Erlang was built to address.” Yet, as he concedes in his preface, “Erlang has long been a mysterious dark corner of the programming universe, visited mostly by developers who need extreme reliability or scalability and people who want to stretch their brains.”

Brain-stretching indeed is one reason why Erlang has stayed in that dark corner for more than two decades.

The language’s learning curve, St. Laurent notes, “starts gently for a while, then it gets much steeper as you realize the discipline involved, and then goes nearly vertical for a little while as you try to figure out how that discipline affects getting work done—and then it’s suddenly calm and peaceful with a gentle grade for a long time as you reapply what you’ve learned in different contexts.”

In a world where everything seemingly must be done in a hurry, you won’t learn Erlang in a hurry. But the payoff for learning it can be rewarding. Erlang, it seems, now is on a roll and experiencing growing demand. The language has been showing up in many different places, from Facebook to CouchDB to the Costa Rican Institute of Technology, to name just a few. Numerous package managers, such as Debian, MacPorts, and Ubuntu, also include a version of Erlang in their default installation.

I run Windows machines, and getting Erlang onto them has proved pleasingly easy. Indeed, Windows users apparently have some of the easiest times getting started with Erlang. Just go to http://erlang.org/download.html and click on the correct link – 32-bit or 64-bit – for your PC.

The book’s code samples can be downloaded from a link provided in the book. And it’s easy to work with the Erlang shell, its command-line interface. The newest version now provides numbered lines.

But, if you’ve worked with other programming languages, Erlang’s syntax likely will seem awkward and strange for a while.

“Punctuation is different and capitalization matters,” the author emphasizes. “Periods even get used as conclusions rather than connectors!”

To display the current working directory in the shell, for instance, you type pwd(). And do not forget to include the period.

To move up a directory, you type cd(“..”). And do not forget to include both the quotation marks and the concluding period.

Indeed, almost everything you enter in Erlang seemingly must end with a period.

Also: “Forget classes, forget variables that change values—even forget the conventions of variable assignment,” the author cautions. “Instead, you’re going to have to think about pattern matching, message passing, and establishing pathways for data rather than telling it where to go.”

Introducing Erlang takes a slow and gentle but effective approach to learning this powerful and difficult language. Simon St. Laurent spends a lot of time trying to help readers “get comfortable in the sunny meadows at the bottom of the learning curve.” Still, his well-written book effectively and efficiently meets its stated goal of helping you “learn to write simple Erlang programs.” It likewise shows and explains how to get started working with the OTP, the Open Telecom Platform’s libraries.

The book and its numerous code examples offer a solid grounding in the basics that you can then use to “understand why Erlang makes it easier to build resilient programs that can scale up or down with ease.” And, if you decide to continue learning, Simon St. Laurent’s new book can make it easier for you to move on to the really brain-stretching, and shadowy, inner workings of Erlang.

– Si Dunn

Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot – #diy #bookreview

Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot
Michael Margolis
(O’Reilly – paperback, Kindle)

Technology now makes it relatively easy to build simple robots that can be controlled remotely or can control themselves autonomously using built-in sensors and software.

This engaging how-to guide focuses on how to build and program a small robot that can roam around, sense its environment, and perform a variety of tasks, using either type of control.

Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot is an excellent book for teachers, hobbyists and experimenters who like working with software and hardware. The book’s simple robot moves about on a chassis that has two-wheel or four-wheel drive. And its heart is an Arduino Uno or Arduino Leonardo microcontroller running programs (“sketches”) provided in the book and available at a link for download.

Some basic assembly is required, including gathering parts and circuit boards and doing some soldering and mechanical assembly, following the book’s instructions. The robot can be built on small platforms from DFRobot or platforms of your own creation. And devices can be added, including distance sensors, infrared reflectance sensors, and remote control receivers.

The book is “not an introduction to programming,” however. If you have no experience with programming or programming Arduino microcontrollers, the author recommends two books: Getting Started with Arduino, 2^nd Edition, and Arduino Cookbook, 2^nd Edition.

Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot has 11 chapters and six appendices. The chapters are:

1. Introduction to Robot Building
2. Building the Electronics
3. Building the Two-Wheeled Mobile Platform
4. Building the Four-Wheeled Mobile Platform
5. Tutorial: Getting Started with Arduino
6. Testing the Robot’s Basic Functions
7. Controlling Speed and Direction
8. Tutorial: Introduction to Sensors
9. Modifying the Robot to React to Edges and Lines
10. Autonomous Movement
11. Remote Control

The appendices are:

• Appendix A: Enhancing Your Robot
• Appendix B: Using Other Hardware with Your Robot
• Appendix C: Debugging Your Robot
• Appendix D: Power Sources
• Appendix E: Programming Constructs
• Appendix F: Arduino Pin and Timer Usage

Whether you love serious experimentation and invention or just tinkering for fun and mental challenge, Make an Arduino-Controlled Robot opens up many possibilities for individual, family, and classroom activities and learning.

– Si Dunn

Make: Volume 32 – Zany and practical projects and articles for DIY builders – #bookreview

Make: Volume 32
(O’Reilly, paperback)

Make: is a science, technology, and do-it-yourself (DIY) projects magazine published quarterly in paperback book format. Volume 32 not only has intriguing articles about private rocketeers, flying motorcycles, and human-size replicas of videogame costumes and weapons. It also has about two dozen “complete plans” for a wide array of useful and zany projects.

One of the projects in Volume 32 is “The Awesome Button,” a big red desktop button that you can hit when you can’t think of a synonym for the totally overused word “awesome” while you’re composing email or a letter or a manuscript. The project uses a $16 Teensy USB Development Board made by PJRC, plus some downloaded code. When your fist hammers down on the big red button, the board generates random synonyms for “awesome” and sends them to your computer so you can quickly accept or reject them in your document.

Another project is a catapult launcher that will send a tiny balsa wood glider zooming 150 feet into the air. Beats the heck out of a rubber band looped around a Popsicle stick.

And another DIY article focuses on the joys of salvaging perfectly good electronic and mechanical parts from discarded laser printers, so you can use the parts in other projects.

Make: Volume 33 is due to appear in January. In the meantime, Volume 32 is full of fun reading and intriguing projects, such as how to transform data files into synthesized music.

– Si Dunn

Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV – ‘Seeing’ with Python – #programming #bookreview

Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV
Kurt Demaagd, Anthony Oliver, Nathan Oostendorp, and Katherine Scott
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

SimpleCV, or Simple Computer Vision, is “an easy-to-use Python framework that bundles together open source computer vision libraries and algorithms for solving problems,” according to the authors of this useful and informative how-to book.

The subtitle is “Making Computers See in Python,” and the codes examples require Python 2.7.

Why learn computer vision? “As cameras are becoming standard PC hardware and a required feature of mobile devices, computer vision is moving from a niche tool to an increasingly common tool for a diverse range of applications,” the authors note.

Indeed, cameras and computer vision now are being used in everything from facial recognition systems and video games to automobile safety, industrial automation, medicine, planetary exploration, and even agriculture.

“The SimpleCV framework has compiled installers for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux, but it can be used on any system on which Python and OpenCV can be built,” the authors state.

Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV shows how to use the framework and simple application examples to get started toward building your own computer vision applications. The 240-page book has 10 chapters:

• Introduction
• Getting to Know the SimpleCV Framework
• Image Sources
• Pixels and Images
• The Impact of Light
• Image Arithmetic
• Drawing on Images
• Basic Feature Detection
• FeatureSet Manipulation
• Advanced Features (focuses on optical flow)

The book also has three appendices: Advanced Shell Tips, Cameras and Lenses; and Advanced Features (deals with advanced segmentation and feature extraction tools).

Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV provides a good overview of computer vision basics and shows, using simple but effective examples, how you can put them to work.

– Si Dunn

LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future – #bookreview

LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future
Sal Cangeloso
(O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

Sal Cangeloso of Geek.com and ExtremeTech.com wants to warm you up to some really cool lighting: light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.

His new book, LED Lighting: A Primer to Lighting the Future, encourages readers to start using more LEDs and let loose of the incandescent bulb’s 130-year-old technology, as well as the curly, tricky-to-recycle compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs that last longest when they are not turned off and on and off and on and.…

Lighting and lighting choices are not actually simple topics, and Cangeloso packs plenty of information, both practical and technical, into his helpful 58-page book. He includes a couple of simple, do-it-yourself experiments involving small LED lamps, resistors and batteries, as well.

LED Lighting delves into matters such as color quality, power consumption comparisons, and prices, as well as the sometimes “off-putting” fact that LED bulbs often look like yellow bug lamps, even though they produce white light. The author also explains why highly efficient LED bulbs have built-in heat sinks, while other types of light bulbs do not. “The main reason is that LEDs don’t give off heat in the form of infrared radiation. This means cooling must be handled through other means, such as conduction through a heat sink.”

LED bulbs also don’t give off ultraviolet (UV) light. So that’s one more practical reason to consider using them. As Cangeloso notes: “LED bulbs don’t attract insects, which are drawn to UV light.”

– Si Dunn

The Sony SLT-A77: The Unofficial Quintessential Guide – #photography #bookreview

The Sony SLT-A77: The Unofficial Quintessential Guide
Carol F. Roullard and Brian Matsumoto
(Rocky Nook, paperback)

The Sony SLT-A77 “single lens translucent” digital camera is a remarkably feature-rich device for shooting still photographs and HD video.

Unlike a digital SLR camera, which must move its mirror out of the light path to its sensor, the A77’s “translucent mirror technology” effectively splits the incoming beam, sending part of it up to the viewfinder and allowing the rest of the light to pass through the mirror to the sensor.

The A77’s many capabilities make it a complicated camera to master without help from a good manual. This 255-page “unofficial” guidebook was written by photography experts who use A77s. They clearly love the camera, yet they are not hesitant to point out A77’s occasional shortcomings and drawbacks, as well.

The new Sony camera has a 24.3 megapixel sensor, and its translucent, fixed mirror provides at least three key capabilities. The camera can fire multiple fast shots (up to 12 frames per second) with a single button push. There is almost no vibration when the shutter button is pressed. And the camera’s automatic focus responds much quicker than older methods while shooting video.

“The Sony A77 works effectively for all users, regardless of their level of expertise,” the authors state. “It can be used with automatic setting, so beginners can take pictures by pointing and shooting. As you become more proficient, you can alter the A77’s exposure and focus settings. Eventually, you can take full control by setting the camera to manual and disregarding its recommendations.”

The book is organized with chapters for beginning, intermediate, and expert photographers.

• Chapter 1: Getting Started
• Chapter 2: Photography Basics and the A77’s External Buttons
• Chapter 3: Managing Your Images
• Chapter 4: Automatic Settings
• Chapter 5: Customizing the Camera
• Chapter 6: Taking Control of the Camera
• Chapter 7: Manual Operation of the Camera
• Chapter 8: Additional Features
• Chapter 9: Using Accessories
• Chapter 10: Flash Photography
• Chapter 11: Recording Movies
• Appendix A: Menu Commands
• Appendix B: Common Error/Warning Messages and Resolutions

If your interests include specialized photography, the authors note that the A77 can be mounted to many types of telescopes, and it works very well with certain small telescopes “that can double for terrestrial field work.”

The A77 also offers several advantages for those who currently use single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras with microscopes. “Its live preview solves the problem of accurate focusing, giving you a bright image that can be magnified,” the two authors point out. “Because it previews the image, errors in color balance can be corrected.” Also: “Perhaps the A77’s most important feature for the microscopist is the absence of camera vibration during image capture. A fixed mirror eliminates mirror slap, and the electronic first curtain shutter is vibration free.”

One of the “additional features” described in Chapter 8 is a built-in GPS receiver. “The A77 can be set up to capture GPS information and store it with still pictures recorded at the site,” the two authors note. “The camera’s software goes further by also correcting date and time information that may have changed due to entering a different time zone. So, when you return from trips where you see a new location every day, you don’t have to try to reconstruct which pictures came from where. The saved GPS information does that for you when you view your images through Sony’s PMB software.”

The Sony SLT-A77: The Unofficial Quintessential Guide includes numerous photographs, viewfinder shots, control close-ups, menu screens, menu steps, and other illustrations.

“The Sony A77 camera is complex and can be daunting with its scores of menu commands, functions, and options,” the two writers concede.

But their new guidebook can help you master the Sony SLT-A77, one feature, one choice, and one click at a time.

– Si Dunn

Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, 3rd. Ed. – Has info for new AirPort Utility 6 – #Apple #bookreview

Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, Third Edition
Glenn Fleishman
(TidBITS Publishing, Inc., ebook [ePub, Mobi, PDF], $20.00)

Attention users of Apple’s 802.11n gear in Wi-Fi networking. TidBITS Publishing recently has released a new edition of Take Control of your 802.11n Airport Network.

Its author points out: “If you’re setting up, extending, or retooling a Wi-Fi network with one or more 802.11n base stations from Apple— including the AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, or Time Capsule— using AirPort Utility 6 on the Mac or AirPort Utility in iOS, this book will help you get the fastest network with the least equipment and fewest roadblocks. This book also has advice on connecting to a Wi-Fi network from older versions of Mac OS X and Windows 7.”

If you are still using AirPort Utility 5, pay attention.

“This third edition,” TidBITS notes, “has a significant change: it replaces its former coverage of AirPort Utility 5 in favor of focusing on AirPort Utility 6, which was released in February 2012. AirPort Utility 6 runs on 10.7 Lion or later. AirPort Utility 6 has many of the features that are documented in previous editions of this book, but it omits several options designed for mixed 802.11g and 80211.n networks and it can’t configure 802.11b and 802.11g AirPort base station models (any base station released from 1999 to 2006). Also, it supports only iCloud, not MobileMe, for remote connections.”

If you are caught in the middle and need to support both AirPort Utility 5 and AirPort Utility 6, purchasers of this ebook are given a link where they can refer to the previous edition, at no extra charge.

Says Fleishman, “The big new feature in AirPort Utility 6 is a graphical depiction of the layout of an AirPort network. This is terrific for visualizing how parts are connected and seeing where errors lie. This third edition also discusses AirPort Utility for iOS, which has a similar approach to AirPort Utility 6, and makes it possible to configure and manage an Apple base station without a desktop computer. That’s a first for Apple.”

The book is well-written, with text presented in short paragraphs for easier viewing on portable devices.

Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, Third Edition also offers a good number of uncomplicated illustrations, screenshots, tips, warnings, and lists of steps.

– Si Dunn

Fitness for Geeks – A book that will knock you OFF your butt – #bookreview

Fitness for Geeks: Real Science, Great Nutrition, and Good Health
Bruce W. Perry
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $34.95; Kindle edition, list price $27.99)

You know it’s true: You spend way too much time at home and at the office just sitting on your back pockets, staring at computer screens.

You do have some mobile devices. But, to use them, you mostly just carry them into your favorite free WiFi coffee shop and then sit, eat bagels and drink coffee while you poke, occasionally twitch a finger and squint.

 Not much of a healthy workout, is it?

 Many of us now spend most of our days and nights engaged in what Bruce W. Perry calls “a marathon bout of sitting.” Indeed, toss in the time spent sitting in your car as you commute to and from work, and you are a perfect example of a modern lifestyle that some scientists now term “chair living.”

It’s time, says Perry, to move, to skip the elevator and take the stairs (two at a time, if possible) on your way to and from those chairs.

 It’s time to find the company fitness center and start using it. It’s time to pay closer attention to what and how much you are eating, especially while sitting, computing and commuting. And it’s time to realize that you are spending too much time in front of your computer or TV when you should be sleeping.

Perry, a software engineer, journalist and self-described “fitness geek” has written an entertaining, inspiring and downright helpful book that draws from “the many parallels between software design and fitness geekdom, such as the whole concept of antipatterns, or learning how to do something by studying how not to do it first.”

There are, he notes, many apps, websites and devices now that can help you track, calculate and chart effort, calories, distances, sleep and other fitness factors.  He even tosses in a few bits of code that can help you, for example, display the route and distance that you just covered on a bike ride

Now is the time for all good geeks to come to the aid of their chair-shaped, digitally softened bodies.

Fitness for Geeks is organized into 11 standalone chapters that you can read in any order, Perry says. The chapters are:

1.  Fitness and the Human Codebase: Reboot Your Operating System
2. Fitness Tools and Apps
3. Food Chemistry Basics: Proteins, Fats, and Carbs
4. Micronutrients: Vitamins, Minerals, and Phytochemicals
5. Food Hacks: Finding and Choosing Food
6. Food Timing: When to Eat, When to Fast
7. The Other World: A.K.A Outside
8. Hello, Gym! Finding Your Way Around the Fitness Facility
9. Randomizing Fitness and the Importance of R & R
10. Code Maintenance: Human Fueling and Supplements
11. Lifestyle Hacks for Fitness

 There is no complete escape from chair living, of course. We still have to sit at our home computers, sit in front of our TVs, sit in our cars, sit at coffee shops, and sit, sit, sit at the office.

But chair living does not have to consume us and kill us. We can find the time to make better choices: Skip the escalator and the éclair; eat a carrot and take the stairs. And we can find tools that can help us enhance those choices – digital and physical. They are already out there. 

Mainly, we just have to make ourselves get off our butts for a little while each day and do something healthful with the time out of chair.

Bruce W. Perry’s new book can help you discover – yes, even program – a workable path to better living.

#

– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. He also is a former newspaper and magazine photojournalist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir. He is the author of an e-book detective novel, Erwin’s Law, now also available in paperback, plus a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.

Control this! Four new how-to books that use Arduino – #electronics #programming #bookreview #in

The Arduino microcontroller and programming environment let you create, program, and control a variety of devices that interact with the physical world.

Some of the things you can do with Arduino are very simple, such as adjusting the color of an RGB (red, green, blue) LED under program control. Other projects are more complex, such as creating a system that will notify you by email when a package has been left at your front door or controlling a small robotic arm.

According to the Arduino website: “Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

Four new Arduino-related books recently have been released by O’Reilly and Pragmatic Bookshelf. They are: Arduino Cookbook, 2nd Edition; Programming Your Home; Programming Interactivity, 2nd Edition; and Making Things See.

Arduino Cookbook, 2nd Edition
By Michael Margolis
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $44.99; Kindle edition, list price $35.99)

If you’ve been curious about Arduino, this book is a fine place to start and learn a lot about what you can do with the popular little microprocessor hardware and its software. And don’t be intimidated by the book’s hefty size: 699 pages. It is packed with how-to projects, and you won’t need experience with electronics or programming to get started.

Michael Margolis has updated his Cookbook to cover Arduino 1.0. A variety of “official boards” can be found via the Web, according to Margolis, but the “basic board that most people start with [is] the Arduino Uno.” Radio Shack and other outlets sell it. The Uno has a USB connector “that is used to provide power and connectivity for uploading your software onto the board.”

Speaking of software, you will want to install Arduino’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on your computer. The software, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, can be downloaded here. Margolis explains how to set up each version and also how to set up the Arduino board (and some new boards such as Leonardo).

In the Arduino world, a piece of source code is known as a “sketch.” Virtually every how-to-program book for computers starts out with a simple “Hello World” example. And the Ardunio Cookbook is no exception. It shows how to load a very simple program into the board and make an LED blink on and off. From there, the projects become increasingly more robust, until you are generating audio tones, controlling motors and servos, reading temperatures with digital thermometers, and even using Arduino to send messages to Twitter.

This well-written and well-illustrated book nicely lives up to its tagline: “Recipes to Begin, Expand, and Enhance Your Projects.”

The three other Arduino-related books focus on more specific applications of the microprocessor and its software.

Programming Your Home: Automate with Arduino, Android, and Your Computer
By Mike Riley, edited by Jacquelyn Carter
(Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback, list price $33.00)

For those who have some basic experience with Arduino, Programming Your Home offers several fun and useful home automation projects, such as an electronic guard dog, a Web-enabled light switch, a door lock you can open or latch from an Android phone, and a package-delivery alert tool that can send you an email.

Programming Your Home is well written and shows, step-by-step, how to wire up the external components to the Arduino board, program the applications, test them and use them. A second goal is to give you the skills and confidence necessary to create “custom home automation projects of  your own design.”

The author states: “Programming Your Home is best suited to DIYers, programmers, and tinkerers who enjoy spending their leisure time building high-tech solutions to further automate their lives and impress their friends and family with their creations.”

He adds: “The projects also make great parent-child learning activities, as the finished products instill a great sense of accomplishment.”

One family-oriented example is an Arduino-controlled bird feeder that time-stamps bird visits and their durations and stores the data. It also sends out Twitter tweets that alert nearby bird watchers and signal the need for more bird food. 

The most complex project in his book is also one of the coolest: a smartphone app that lets you call home and unlock or lock a door remotely. It uses a first-generation Android phone, a Sparkfun IOIO board and a few other components. This project does not use the Arduino board, but the programming and hardware experience gained from working with the Arduino comes in handy.

Programming Interactivity, 2nd Edition
By Joshua Noble
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $49.99; Kindle edition, list price $39.99 )

“This book,” says Joshua Noble, ”is called Programming Activity because it’s focused primarily on programming for interaction design, that is, programming to create an application with which users interact directly.”

His 704-page how-to guide is aimed at readers who “don’t have a deep, or even any, programming or technical background [but] you’re a designer, artist, or other creative thinker interested in learning about code to create interactive applications in some way or shape.”

The tagline for this updated edition is: “A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks.” Those are the three key areas covered in the book.

“Processing,” Noble points out, “was the one of the first open source projects that was specifically designed for simplifying the practice of creating interactive graphical applications so that nonprogrammers could easily create artworks. Artists and designers developed Processing as an alternative to similar proprietary tools.”

As for Arduino, Noble focuses first on programming using the Arduino IDE. Then he introduces wiring parts and devices to the board and making them work. Soon, he jumps into object-oriented programming using C++, and then he moves to openFrameworks (oF), “which is a collection of code created to help you do something in particular.”

He adds: “Specifically, oF is a framework for artists and designers working with interactive design and media art.”

From there, his book moves into physical input, programming graphics, bitmaps and pixels, sound and audio, Arduino and creating physical feedback (such as turning on motors, servos or household appliances), protocols and communication, graphics and OpenGL, motion and gestures, movement and location, spaces and environments, and further resources.

Noble covers a lot of ground, using a mixture of text, illustration and code examples. And he offers plenty of links and additional topics. Unlike many how-to guides, he includes “interviews with programmers, artists, designers, and authors who work with the tools covered in this book.”

Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot
By Greg Borenstein
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $39.99; Kindle edition, list price $31.99)

Arduino becomes a key factor beginning on page 353 of this fascinating and challenging 416-page book aimed at gamers, artists, technology hobbyists and others.

The microprocessor becomes the brain of a small, easy-to-build robotic arm that can, within  limits, ”reproduce the motions of a real arm.”

Much of this book focuses on the Microsoft Kinect, a popular peripheral for Microsoft’s XBox 360 video game system, which the author of Making Things See terms a “depth camera.” A Kinect contains an infrared projector and infrared camera, an RGB camera, and some microphones. “The Kinect…records the distance of the objects that are placed in front of it…[and]…uses infrared light to create an image (a depth image) that captures not what the objects look like, but where they are in space….[A] depth image is much easier for a computer to ‘understand’ than a conventional color image,” Borenstein writes.

There is focus, as well, on Processing and on 3-D printing using a MakerBot ReplicatorG or the Shapeways online service.

The book offers several projects, and, in the final one, Kinect and Arduino are linked together and the Arduino is programmed to control a basic robotic arm that responds to forward or inverse kinematics. Using two servos, the arm can move up and down at “elbow” and “shoulder” and follow the movements of a particular point.

“Our bodies respond to physical objects differently than graphics on a screen,” Borenstein states, “and there’s something powerful about closing that loop by making interactive objects that can see us move around the room and respond by moving in kind.”

He adds: “Rather than just waving at computers, now we’ve taught them to wave back.”

#

– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. He also is a former newspaper and magazine photojournalist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir. He is the author of an e-book detective novel, Erwin’s Law, now also available in paperback, plus a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.