Design by numbers

From the Publisher: Most art and technology projects pair artists with engineers or scientists: the artist has the conception, and the technical person provides the know-how. John Maeda is an artist and a computer scientist, and he views the computer not as a substitute for brush and paint but as an artistic medium in its own right. Design By Numbers is a reader-friendly tutorial on both the philosophy and nuts-and-bolts techniques of programming for designers and artists. Practicing what he preaches, Maeda composed Design By Numbers using a computational process he developed specifically for the book. He introduces a programming language and development environment, available on the Web, which can be freely downloaded or run directly with any JAVA-enabled Web browser. Appropriately, the new language is called DBN (for design by numbers). Designed for visual people -- artists, designers, anyone who likes to pick up a pencil and doodle -- DBN has very few commands and consists of elements resembling those of many other languages, such as LISP, LOGO, C/JAVA, and BASIC.