Today I started on the O'Reilly book, "Visualizing Data," written by Ben Fry. I breezed through the first couple introductory chapters, and then started to get my feet wet in Processing. Fry's approach is to provide the reader data, files, and source code to get an example project up and running, and then to teach new aspects of programming via adding to this example. Processing is neat! Its creators were attempting to create a visual programming language that follows the form of a scripting language. I've never done anything involving scripting languages, so it was fun to see a different approach to code.
At the end of my reading today, I was up to a map of the US (provided) that had a data point plotted in the center of each state (data provided), with the data point's color and size coordinating to the sign and magnitude, respectively, of a (provided) table of random numbers. When the user mouses over a circle, it displays the value of that point, in addition to the name of the date (table provided). Neat!
Fry also explained the approach that he takes to creating a data visualization, and categorized several of the Processing functions used according to these categories. I look forward to learning more of them!
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