Learn Quartz Composer in One Weekend

Quartz composer (QC) is an interactive dataflow language from Apple (you need MacOS to run it).   I prototype many things in QC because it is very easy to do many things like test image processing functions by feeding the web cam into it.   Facebook prototypes their apps on a version of QC they have extended for their purposes.   Lots of people, including me, love it.   However, visual dataflow a pretty different way of programming and there are also conventions in QC that that are easy, but somebody needs to show them to you.    I spent about a week learning QC to the point where I could do something useful because I was a bit overwhelmed by all of the documentation out there.    However, key was I found an almost perfect set of youtube videos by Rob Duarte.     Go through these videos on Day 1, and be sure to follow each one and actually duplicate his compositions as you go.   On Day 2, do your own project.   I, for example, did face detection on the webcam and then added devil horns.   That was a really easy project in QC because there is a face detection module build in.