A collection of design and programming resources for students, indie developers, and artists.
- Art and design
- Assembly language for 8-bit computers and game consoles
- Electronics
- HTML & CSS
- Javascript
- JSON
- Kinect
- Machine learning and AI
- Markdown
- Microcontrollers (incl. Arduino, Photon, etc.)
- node.js
- Processing
- Productivity
- Python
- Raspberry Pi
- Swift
- Web APIs
- 3D Modeling in Adobe Illustrator: Use Adobe Illustrator to model basic 3D objects.
- Hello World: Where Design Meets Life: All of the theoretical teachings of design school without the crippling student debt.
- How to edit videos with Premiere Pro: Adobe's quickstart guide to editing in Premiere (Adobe CC).
- Moving into the World of 3D: A video tutorial on creating 3D art in Adobe Illustrator.
- So you want to build a generator...: Excellent, in-depth post on the theory and practice of building computational art and generative code.
- Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative: Required reading for upcoming artists.- Tech Trek: Create Your Own Font: A tutorial for making a font with free web-based tools.
- 6502 Assembly Language Programming: This workbook-style book will teach you how to write assembly language code for the Apple II, Commodore 64, NES, and other hot new 6502-based systems!
- AtariAge: Atari 2600 Programming Guide: Metaresource for Atari 2600 programming (documentation, sample code, utilities, etc.) from Atari enthusiast forum AtariAge.
- Romhacking.net: Active community for video game ROM hacking (mostly 8- and 16-bit) with useful collections of utilities and documentation.
- NintendoAge: The premiere forum for NES collectors and general enthusiasts has a subforum on NES programming with some of the best NES ASM tutorials ("Nerdy Nights") out there.
- SMS Power!: Development: Development resources for 8-bit SEGA consoles such as the Sega Master System and SG-1000.
- Animated Flying Toaster OLED Jewelry: Adafruit tutorial on creating an adorably tiny Macintosh-inspired animated display.
- Conductive Thread: An Adafruit tutorial on using conductive thread.
- Creative Case Hacks: No 3D Printer Required!: Ben Heck demonstrates how to make an acrylic electronics closure by hand.
- Cricut Explore Blade and Blade Housing Changes and Comparisons: This video has some great information about replacing blades in the Cricut Explore.
- Crochet Battery Holder: Instructions for making an ingenious crocheted coin cell battery holder.
- DIY Neon Sign: Use EL wire to make something that looks a lot like a neon sign.
- Hack everything: Repurposing everyday devices: A conference talk by Matt Evans that walks through hacking reclaimed electroncs.
- Introduction to Interfaces: An episode of the Ben Heck show that breaks down I2C, SPI, and RS-232 interfaces.
- Bootstrap: A 12-grid framework that makes building beautiful and responsive websites way too easy.
- Build an HTML5 game: A book for web developers who want to transfer skills with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to game design and development.
- Can I Use...?: Bible of browser compatibility for new features in HTML, CSS, and more.
- HTML5 Canvas Scratch Pad: A web-based testing environment for Canvas that includes sample code to modify and play around with.
- HTML5's canvas element, and a bit of SVG: Blog post describing some of the capabilities of HTML5 Canvas.
- HTML5's canvas part II: Pixel manipulation: A follow-up blog post to the one above that describes image processing in Canvas.
- HTML5 Hacks: A blog showcasing cool and useful things to do with HTML5. There's also a book that despite being a little outdated is a good reference.- MDN: CSS: Comprehensive CSS reference and teaching materials.
- MDN: HTML: Comprehensive HTML reference and teaching materials.
- MDN: Tutorials: A collection of HTML and CSS tutorials compiled by the Mozilla Developer Network.
- Perfection Kills: Articles on the ins and outs of HTML, CSS, and JS.
- Canvas, images, and pixels: Things I learned building an 8-bit logo generator: Good walkthrough of an image manipulation project build with Javascript and HTML5 Canvas.
- W3Schools: CSS: Easy-to-use CSS resource.
- W3Schools: HTML5: Easy-to-use HTML resource.
- AngularJS: Developer Guide: The official guide to AngularJS.
- Explain Like I'm Five: Model-View-Controller (MVC) software architecture: What the hell is an MVC Javascript framework, anyway? Read this quick explanation on MVC in general from Reddit's ELI5 subforum.
- idiomatic.js: A collaboratively-created Javascript style guide to writing "consistent, idiomatic JavaScript."
- Javascript Best Practices: Christian Heilmann's common-sense approaches to writing good Javascript.
- Javascript Design Patterns: An advanced Udacity course for Javascript developers.
- Javascript MVC: An in-depth conceptual explanation of Javascript MVC. (Warning: Written in 2009, it's absolutely ancient by today's standards and framework-agnostic conversation.)
- Javascript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design Patterns: A book for intermediate Javascript developers on elegant code design, best practices, and tested design patterns. A bit outdated given its 2010 publication date, but valuable nonetheless.
- MDN: Tutorials: A collection of Javascript tutorials compiled by the Mozilla Developer Network.
- Meteor Guide: Guide to using Meteor for building web applications.
- Modern Workflow & Tooling: Grunt? Gulp? Node? Huh? Watch Wes Bos's talk on modern web development tooling and get caught up on the latest in build and workflow tooling.
- p5.js: A Javascript library inspired by Processing and made for artists.
- Programming--the Real Basics!: Christian Heilmann's easy-to-read primer on getting started with Javascript.
- three.js: A 3D-graphics Javascript library.
- W3Schools: Javascript: Easy-to-use Javascript resource.
- W3Schools: JQuery: Easy-to-use JQuery resource.
- You Don't Know JS: An excellent deep-dive series of books on Javascript written by Kyle Simpson. Available for purchase or to read online for free.
- ArduinoJSON: JSON parsing/encoding library for microcontrollers, including Arduino and Particle Photon (via the Particle online IDE).
- Excel to JSON: Automatically converts Excel documents to JSON with rad and easy-to-use conventions for nesting, arrays, and more. Requires Leiningen.
- JSON Editor Online
- json.human.js: Json Formatting for Human Beings: View a JSON file in a human-readable HTML table.
- JSON Editor: Feed in a JSON schema, and you'll get an interactive HTML form that can be used to create/update a JSON file.
- JSON Schema: The JSON schema specification document.
- 3D Builder: Video tutorials on how to use the Kinect v2 to scan and print 3D models.
- Developing with Kinect for Windows v2 on a Mac: Microsoft's guide to installing Windows on a USB drive to do Kinect development on a Mac. (That may be the weirdest sentence ever typed!)
- Introduction à la Kinect V2 pour Windows (French language): Une introduction aux caractéristiques de la Kinect V2 pour Windows.
- KinectPV2: Processing library for Kinect v2.
- LightBuzz Software: GitHub: A great collection of Kinect projects and code, including Kinect-Drawing, Vitruvius, Kinect-Finger-Tracking, Kinect-2-CSV, and Kinect-HTML5.
- Programming Kinect for Windows v2: An in-depth video series on writing code for the Kinect. About 6 hours of content (spread out over seven videos) and suitable for beginners.
- Azure Machine Learning Studio: Build machine learning models with a drag-and-drop interface, then publish them as APIs.
- A Beginner's Guide to Deep Neural Networks: An introduction to deep neural networks from the Google Research Blog.
- CNTK: An open-source deep-learning toolkit.
- Machine Learning and Art - Google I/O 2016: Video about the applications of machine learning by artists.
- Microsoft Bot Framework - LUIS: A blog post by Kat Harris about integrating the Microsoft Bot Framework with LUIS language processing.
- Microsoft Bot Framework Post Roundup: Collection of links about building stuff with the Microsoft Bot Framework.
- Microsoft Cognitive Services: APIs around computer vision, speech recognition, and more.
- DocPad: A node-based static-site generator that lets you author however you like, including with Markdown.
- Hexo: Another node-based static-site generator with primary authoring via Markdown.
- Markdown: Syntax: The official guide to Markdown syntax.
- VS Code Speedrun: Markdown: A two-minute video showing how to work with Markdown in VS Code.
- ArduinoJSON: JSON parsing/encoding library for microcontrollers, including Arduino and Particle Photon (via the Particle online IDE).
- Arduino Tutorials: Tutorials and programming reference materials from the official Arduino website.
- ConnectedNES: A hack that adds WiFi connectivity and a streaming twitter client to the original NES.
- Espruino Quick Start: Getting started with Espruino boards, microcontrollers powered by the magic of Javascript!
- How to Setup a Particle Photon and a 16x2 LCD Screen: Jon Gallant goes through wiring up and grabbing libraries for a Photon and a standard 16x2 LCD screen.
- Play Melody: Simple Arduino routine for playing melodies with a piezo speaker.
- Spark Twitter Magnet: Display a twitter stream using the Particle Photon.
- The Maker Show, ep. 7: The Photon Awakens: Nick Landry walks through setting up the Photon and connecting it to a simple web app.
- The Maker Show, ep. 10: Adding a Coin Acceptor to Your Arduino Project: Add a coin mechanism to an Arduino using interrupts.
- Tutorial: Spark Variable and Function on One Page: Build a web interface that sends data to and receives data from a Particle Photon.
- Word Clock v2: A clock built with an RGB LED strand and a Particle Photon that demonstrates good techniques for lighted sign making.
- Azure demo: Getting started with Azure DocumentDB on node.js: Storing, retrieving, and querying contents of a DocumentDB collection in a simple node.js app.
- Calling a REST API from a NodeJS Script: A simple explanation of how to call a REST API from a node app.
- How to use Blob storage from node.js: Upload, retrieve, and delete blobs in a node.js application.
- Node.js apps: what’s the difference between installing npm packages locally and globally?: "Global packages are for anything that you need to access from the shell. By contrast local packages are for using within your apps."
- npm Documentation: Official documentation and getting-started guide for npm.
- oled-js: A library for interacting with an OLED via Javascript. The code repository is on GitHub.
- Project Oxford for Node: Use Face API, Emotion API, and Computer Vision API in a node project.
- KinectPV2: Processing library for Kinect v2.
- p5.js: A Javascript library inspired by Processing and made for artists.
- Processing: Processing is a programming language and development environment targeted at visualization.
- V3GA BlobDetection: Processing library for computer vision "blob finding."
- Unix/Linux Commands Cheat Sheet: "It's a Unix system... I know this!" But if you don't, print this out and keep it next to your computer for handy reference.
- Visual Studio Code Key Bindings: Printable PDFs of key combos for VS Code on Mac/Windows/Linux. Become super-fast and super-strong!
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners: A book that starts with programming basics and goes through a number of practical projects in Python--available for purchase, as a free PDF, and in video form.
- The Flask Mega-Tutorial: An 18-part (!) tutorial on building a feature-rich web app with Python and Flask.
- Functional Programming in Python: David Mertz's svelte handbook for functional programming in Python, available as a free PDF from O'Reilly.
- Pygame: A collection of Python modules for game development.
- The Python Tutorial: The official Python 3 tutorial from python.org also doubles as a quick documentation and how-to lookup resource. Also available for previous versions.
- Ren'Py: Ren'Py is a beginner-friendly game engine for creating visual novels with Python.
- Digital sign: Tutorial for building a digital display for Windows 10 IoT Core.
- DIY WiFi Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Camera: Adafruit tutorial for making a cloud-connected camera.
- SPI Display: In-depth tutorial for connecting an SPI display device to a Raspberry Pi running Windows IoT Core.
- Web Browser for Windows IOT on Raspberry Pi 2: Video walkthrough that shows you how to build a web browser for Windows on Pi.
- Windows IoT Core Code Samples: Tons of Windows 10 IoT Core code samples--an excellent resource!
- Windows IoT Core Application Management: OK, not the most thrilling name for an article, but super informative: Learn how to set a Windows 10 app for Raspberry Pi to run at startup.
- Intro to iOS App Development with Swift: Udacity course on iOS app development with Swift and Xcode.
- Learn Swift Programming Syntax: Another Swift course on Udacity; this one goes more in depth on the nature of the Swift language. A good place to start if the Intro to iOS App Development course contains terminology unfamiliar to you.
- Object Oriented Programming in Swift: A good intro article from the We Heart Swift blog.
- ProgrammableWeb: Search for any web API under the sun.
- Project Oxford for Node: Use Face API, Emotion API, and Computer Vision API in a node project.
- Working with Timelines: Twitter's official guide to polling timelines responsibly.