Today is the first day of Processing December: 21 days of learning the data visualization language Processing.

I’m starting the project by reading through the slim Getting Started with Processing (GSwP), which was written by the creators of Processing, Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Today I made* it through the first three chapters. (After creating a poster to track my progress, blocking out time in my iCal, reserving two books from the library, joining the Processing Flickr group and creating an account on this web forum.) I drew dots, lines, circles, squares, triangles, arrows, overlapping circles, pterodactyls and a robot. I learned about color fill and stroke and smooth and alpha transparencies. It was a day of fundamentals.

So far it’s easy and boring – at least the pterodactyls and robot were cute. I hope we get to something more practical tomorrow.

* If you can type, you can make it through those chapters, too.