Welcome to Coding Curves.

Coding Curves is all about writing code to draw various interesting and often beautiful 2D curves. Included topics are trigonometric curves, arc, circles, ellipses, Lissajous curves, harmonographs and pintographs, parabolas, Bezier curves, roulette curves, spirals, roses, guilloche patterns, superellipses and superformulas and others. The concepts of each type of curves are discussed and then code is presented, usually built up a bit at a time. Then variations are shown and more ideas are suggested for self-study. Each curve and variation is also graphically demonstrated in the book, which contains 278 illustrations.

Another benefit of the book is getting insight and practice in how to take a formula you find in a book or on the web somewhere and translate that into executable code - in a useful and reusable function that draws a particular shape, how to decide what parameters to provide for that function to fine tune its properties, and sometimes how to compose lower level functions to create more complex shapes.

The code shown is a generalized pseudocode, which avoids the idiosyncrasies of any concrete language, and allows for clear illustration of the techniques and easy porting to the language of your choice, so you can take advantage of the tools your favorite language offers.

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Coding Curves on Gumroad

Sample images

Here is a sampling of the illustrations in the book.