Casey Reas & Ben Fry Processing: A Programming Handbook

If The Nature of Code teaches you to think in systems, Processing: A Programming Handbook teaches you the language those systems are written in. Coming straight from Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the people who created Processing, it’s the authoritative grounding in the tool that sits under an enormous amount of the generative art people end up plotting.

What it teaches

This is a proper handbook: drawing primitives, shape and curve construction, coordinate math, color, image and data handling, all built up methodically with examples. It’s less a story than a structured tour of the language, the kind of book you read once to orient yourself and then keep open beside the editor as a reference. Because the authors designed the language, the explanations are clear about why things work the way they do, not just how.

From screen to pen

Like almost everything in this corner, the output is screen-first — you’ll do the export-to-SVG and tidy-in-vpype step yourself before anything reaches the machine. What makes this book especially useful for plotting is its careful treatment of geometry and curves. Lines, vertices, Bézier and Catmull-Rom curves are the raw material of pen paths, and understanding them from the source means your sketches translate to clean, single-stroke vectors instead of fighting you at export time.

Level and value

Be honest with yourself about format: this is reference-style and thorough rather than a breezy weekend read. If you want momentum and inspiration first, start with Shiffman. But when you’re ready to actually understand the language so you can bend it to your own plotter work, this is the book that pays back for years. Pair it with the free Processing IDE and treat it as the dictionary you grow into.