I have recently been reading the book Making Things See which is a tour of Kinect programming using the Processing language. I have played around a little bit with processing in the past, for some artistic type programming and also because I do a lot of programming in a similar project, Arduino.
Processing itself is a language that runs on the JVM, with a subset that can run in the browser using Processing.js. It is a pretty minimalist language which makes it easy to 'sketch' programs out, which is what they actually refer to the code as. I find it very nice to work in as like Arduino you have two main pieces, a setup method and in this case a draw method which can be though of as being like a game loop (arduino has loop instead of draw). This seems like a very convenient language for doing simple visual based code, and even complex openGL code is possible with it. Because of the simple and clear syntax I think the author has made a fine choice in languages for exploring the Kinect as this is going to be a very visual journey.
The first few projects introduce the basics of the Kinect, from how to install the libraries/drivers needed for later projects as well as the physical hardware and the underlying principles behind it. The first few coding projects will feel very simple for those with significant development backgrounds, especially the initial in depth explanations of the listings. However, I still find it very exciting to get such cool results interfacing with the Kinect so easily.
So far I have gotten up to project 7. This is the first project where I feel any truly experienced developer will want to rewrite the code significantly. The author uses a procedural style, which makes it very easy to follow and focus on the Kinect/computer vision concepts. However There is a significant amount of duplicate code here, and I found an object made short order of cleaning it up significantly.
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