The aesthetic and political implications of working with code as procedure, expression, and action.
Speaking Code begins by invoking the “Hello World” convention used by programmers when learning a new language, helping to establish the interplay of text and code that runs through the book. Interweaving the voice of critical writing from the humanities with the tradition of computing and software development, in Speaking Code Geoff Cox formulates an argument that aims to undermine the distinctions between criticism and practice and to emphasize the aesthetic and political implications of software studies.
Not reducible to its functional aspects, program code mirrors the instability inherent in the relationship of speech to language; it is only interpretable in the context of its distribution and network of operations. Code is understood as both script and performance, Cox argues, and is in this sense like spoken language―always ready for action.
Speaking Code examines the expressive and performative aspects of programming; alternatives to mainstream development, from performances of the live-coding scene to the organizational forms of peer production; the democratic promise of social media and their actual role in suppressing political expression; and the market's emptying out of possibilities for free expression in the public realm. Cox defends language against its invasion by economics, arguing that speech continues to underscore the human condition, however paradoxical this may seem in an era of pervasive computing.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression (Software Studies)

Computers & Technology

McLean, Alex

Cox, Geoff

Programming

The MIT Press

Programming Languages

The first comprehensive introduction to the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding.\nPerformative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts through to computer science. Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice, and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. This multi-authored book—by artists and musicians, software designers, and researchers—provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners. In a more conceptual register, the authors consider liveness, temporality, and knowledge in relation to live coding, alongside speculating on the practice’s future forms.

Live Coding: A User's Manual (Software Studies)

Magnusson, Thor

Blackwell, Alan F.

Cocker, Emma

This guide provides everything you need to get started with Prism and to use it to create flexible, maintainable Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight® 4.0 applications. It can be challenging to design and build WPF or Silverlight client applications that are flexible, maintainable, and that can evolve over time based on changing requirements. These kinds of applications require a loosely coupled modular architecture that allows individual parts of the application to be independently developed and tested, allowing the application to be modified or extended later on. Additionally, the architecture should promote testability, code re-use, and flexibility. Prism helps you to design and build flexible and maintainable WPF and Silverlight applications by using design patterns that support important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling. This guide helps you understand these design patterns and describes how you can use Prism to implement them in your WPF or Silverlight applications. This guide will show you how to use Prism to implement the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern in your application, and how to use it along with commands and interaction requests to encapsulate application logic and make it testable. It will show you how to split an application into separate functional modules that can communicate through loosely coupled events, and how to integrate those modules into the overall application. It will show you how to dynamically construct a flexible user interface by using regions, and how to implement rich navigation across a modular application. Prism allows you to use these design patterns together or in isolation, depending on your particular application requirements.

Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Prism 4: Building Modular MVVM Applications with Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight

Hill, DAVID

Noyes, Brian

Brumfield, Bob

Puleio, Michael

Shifflett, Karl

Microsoft Press

Project Silk provides guidance for building maintainable cross-browser web applications that are characterized by an intentional design, rich interactivity, and a responsive user interface (UI). The result is an immersive and engaging user experience (UX). Such applications take advantage of the latest web standards, including HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript version 5, and modern web technologies such as jQuery and ASP.NET MVC 3. The concepts explained in this book are demonstrated via a real-world customer-facing web application called the Mileage Stats Reference Implementation (Mileage Stats). Mileage Stats allows users to track and compare their vehicles’ fuel efficiency, usage, and operating costs, and to schedule vehicle maintenance reminders. The image below shows the Mileage Stats client-side objects and their implementation mapped to libraries or frameworks. Building a rich web application that reduces the number of full-page loads, includes animations, and is responsible for updating the UI dynamically requires a thoughtful approach to managing structure, modularity, communication, navigation, and data. This book details how the Project Silk team designed Mileage Stats and solved a number of challenges. This guidance is intended for web developers and assumes you have some hands-on experience with ASP.NET MVC, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and jQuery.

Project Silk: Client-Side Web Development for Modern Browsers (Microsoft patterns & practices)

Taylor, Dwayne

Smith, Don

Delgado, Nelly

Microsoft patterns & practices

The book explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking - and curriculum - that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: how power differentials are implicit in code in terms of binary logic, hierarchies, naming of the attributes, and how particular worldviews are reinforced and perpetuated through computation. It introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning.

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Liquid/Living Books)

Soon, Winnie

Open Humanities Press

BASIC on the PC

Software

Dabs Press

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator contemporary art refer to? What constitutes the present present or the contemporary contemporary? Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art, the first book in the Contemporary Condition series, introduces key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present and calls for a deep rethinking of the structures of temporalization.

The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art

Arts & Photography

Lund, Jacob

History & Criticism

Sternber Pr

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