Three DIY Books for your Holiday Wishlist: Making It, Fashion Geek, and Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction

Three great books for anyone who likes to make stuff. Put these on your holiday wish lists.

Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design
Lefteri’s latest book (his material book lineup includes Plastic, Metals, Ceramics, Wood, and more). An easily laid out format shows how various manufacturing techniques are used to make the everyday items we have around us. Full of inspiration.

Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech
How many other fashion books include instructions on how to hack their pedometers or solder LED throwies?

I’m going to name drop again because I’m still star-struck that I got to be friends with the author of this book, Diana Eng (read about my Wired magazine interview with her). She sent me a copy of her book not too long ago, and it really is a fantastic melding of fashion and technology. But even better than the cool styles Diana comes up with is her instructions on how to create these designs (both the sewing and the soldering) yourself.

Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction
By far the most dense of these three books, but still completely digestible and useful for anyone that’s just starting out into the world of digital media. Read more about the open source Processing programming language here.

“This book teaches you the basic building blocks of programming needed to create cutting-edge graphics applications including interactive art, live video processing, and data visualization.

A unique lab-style manual, the book gives graphic and web designers, artists, and illustrators of all stripes a jumpstart on working with the Processing programming environment by providing instruction on the basic principles of the language, followed by careful explanations of select advanced techniques.”