Good starting book to learn fractal programming [closed]

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what is a good book to learn fractal programming? I am a programmer, I am looking at a book that will be more algorithmic than mathematical (at least not in 开发者_开发百科the beginning chapters). Should teach me the basics of fractals and different ways to generate them.

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You might find the electric sheep project interesting. It's an open source, distributed programming project that generates fractal animations.

Scott Drave's original paper on the electric sheep algorithm is a nice introduction to the algorithm used, and it concentrates mostly on the algorithmic aspect of creating the fractal image: http://flam3.com/flame.pdf

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When trying to learn the Mandelbrot set, I found this link useful. http://warp.povusers.org/Mandelbrot/

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For more than just Mandlebrot stuff if you can get ahold of "The Science of Fractal Images". It's an old book now (I read it when it was first published in 1988) but it's full of bits and pieces to try out.

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A "golden oldie" site is Fractint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint. Fractint is 20 years old and pioneered some of the ethos in collaborative computing. Some of the algorithms needed to increase precision are not trivial and this group developed integer arithmetic to support fractals.

Worth visiting to get the feel if nothing else.

But also visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software. There's a huge variety.

Note that some fractals such as the Mandelbrot set are "pixel-based" while others such as the "Snowflake curve" can use vector graphics. You'll need both approaches.

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Some links

• Fractal Programming
• Fractal Geometry