Reddit reviews A Programmer's Guide to Sound

I normally wouldn't recommend The Audio Programming Book to a seasoned programmer, because it seems to assume that you know nothing about programming in general. However, if you're inexperienced at programming, this might be just the place to start.

For someone who already knows some programming, a good book on basic audio programming is A Programmer's Guide to Sound.

A nice, short book on writing software using basic synthesis techniques is Software Synthesis: Making Music with a Computer. It also includes a C++ library you can use.

If you want some immediate hands-on, I would recommend checking out The Synthesis Toolkit in C++.

To code a VST that you can actually use with your DAW, check out the website and books by Will Pirkle.

There are lots of good books and other resources on the topic, but these should make your entrance down the rabbit hole more enjoyable.

It's a bit old now, but I strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Programmers-Guide-Sound-Tim-Kientzle/dp/0201419726/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1291153721&sr=1-3

It got me on the road to audio development and provides a good groundwork for the basics.

If you want to do realtime sound generation, you're probably going to have to get into C, C++ (or Obj-C on the Mac, but most audio code is pure C anyway - it's manipulating buffers of numbers as fast as possible, so Garbage Collection and managed code type languages tend to get in the way - most audio libraries are C/C++ at their heart).

The UI can pretty much be written in anything, provided it can interface to a C library - I tend to use Python + wxPython to knock up quick interfaces if I want a UI.