Title: The SuperCollider Book
Edited by: Scott Wilson, David Cottle, Nick Collins
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2011
Pages: 757
The title emphasizes the fact that we are not in front of one of the many books dealing with SuperCollider but faced with an editorial project that stands as the reference manual for this programming language available for free via the official website.
The SuperCollider Book was published in 2011 and it is, now, the most updated book for a music programming language designed in the second half of the Nineties and now at version 3.6.5 (April, 2013).
The intent of this book is clearly to cover all possible needs of different users interested in learning the features of this programming environment. For this reason, the book is structured in a very defined sections that differ according to the degree of experience of the recipients or depending on what you want to do with SuperCollider.
The first section is called simply Tutorials, and is dedicated to those who approach for the first time this powerful tool, you can easily start learning through tutorial for beginners that covers the first 50 pages of the book and you can browse to the end of this article.
The first section, however, already offers complex insights penetrating into the more complex issues such as the compositional approach articulated in SuperCollider, linking with other software such as PureData or Processing, and the operating of the Unit Generators, which on the one hand represent a very important feature of this language, and the other showed her being closely related, from a historical point of view, withy the evolutionary line of the Music N programming languages by Max Mathews.
The next two sections, Advanced Tutorials, and Platforms and GUI, turn to an expert audience, or that has already been completed with attention to the first part of the book. It should be remembered that SuperCollider is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
The sections Pratical Applications, and Projects and Perspectives moving towards the study of SuperCollider more specific and complex, presenting specific situations or projects that pass over the normal use of the software. Clearly, the topics covered are directed to very experienced users, to whom they offer very interesting opportunities for custom applications.
Since this is the Book of SuperCollider and not a simple book, we can find also an entire section dedicated to those interested to software development or otherwise to those composers interested to and advanced work for the customization of the original tool.
Clearly this is something of a certain complexity, not very interesting for those who have never written a line of code for this language, which instead recommend reading the initial tutorial, at least to see if this language can be suited to your needs and personal characteristics.