Books read in 2011

Book about Programming and the Internet

All Your Base Are Belong to Us

The book All Your Base Are Belong to Us - How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg is a great addition to my growing video game history book collection. Any book that adds tidbits of information about games such as EverQuest and Bioshock is well worth the cost. The book pays the usual and expected homage to Bushnell and Atari for starting the first successful video game endeavor with Pong! We also get back stories on the many contributors to the video game industry - Ralph Baer, William Higginbotham for using equipment intended to forward nuclear research and cobbling a version of pong, and of course the MIT Tech Model Railroad club (TMRC)and the hacker culture it nurtured. This book provides a information about the creator of Mario that I have not read anywhere else and how the Playstation got started (an knocked Nintendo off it mountain). It is a wonderful book if you enjoy history, reading about designers of yore and today. - nyguerrillagirl

Unity 3D Game Development by Example

I read the book Unity 3D Game Development by Example by Ryan Henson Creighton in order to finally learn Unity.

I have mixed feelings about this book. First it was a bit dated from the version of Unity I had to work with. That is not the fault of the author since Unity releases updates quite frequently. I have been working with Unity for a year now and I must have gotten at least four updates. A newer version of the book has been released but I wanted to get through from beginning to end the version of the book I had (since I did actually pay good money for it). I followed the instructions step-by-step. After reading the book I don' t remember or know too much other than following directions. I got more from going through the 3D Buzz website and going through the free tutorials with respect to knowing why I was doing certain things. Yes - I do like the fact that I have working code at the end of a chapter. But, I don't like the fact that I feel more like a code monkey (monkey-see-monkey-do) than I do a Unity programmer. I would have liked to have built a bit less but understood a bit more than I really did. I will probably end up trying another book or two for 2012 and re-do this book again hopefully understanding the reasons why and how. It really matters if I ever hope to build something on my own.

Note: You should probably know your way around the Unity IDE. I highly recommend 3D Buzz free video tutorials. This version of the book used JavaScript for all the coding required. I also highly recommend that you know how to code a bit before tackling this book. In my experience these types of books do not spend sufficient time building what is necessary to develop a coding mindset. I think this is one reason many budding developers walk away and become fashion designers (or is it home decorators?) instead...it is not really hard ...just requires the right fundamentals to start out. -nyguerrillagirl

Renegades of the Empire

The book Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft is rather old. It is all about how Alex St.John and his colleagues created the DirectX API without permission or consent from upper management. They knew that in order for the PC to compete or hold its own against game consoles that a better way was needed to develop games under the Windows Operating Systems. If you played PC games during the early versions of Windows (even into 3.0) you probably did not play any Windows-specific game. All the games ran under DOS (as did Windows!). The Renegades decided to come up with an API to allow game developers with easy access to resources that were important in any game. The book allows us to see what type of programmers Microsoft hired at that time - they were all driven, arrogant and opinionated. The environment was rather competitive and some folks - like Alex St. John had more balls and brash than the rest. The book is an interesting read on days gone by at Microsoft, where you did things and asked permission later. The book can be purchased rather cheaply (1 cent) at amazon.com. I don't know if I would recommend that you spend that plus the shipping and handling charge. If you can pick it from a friend or your local library than that would be a better way to go. -nyguerrillagirl

The Shallows

The book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains was another thought provoking book by Nicolas Carr. The book starts off with a discussion of the seminal book by Marshall McLuhan "Understanding Media: The Extension of Man". The only thing I remembered from the time was the phrase "The medium is the message", which meant nothing to me but was obtuse enough to repeat. Today I understand it to mean that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Many people get caught up in the content - radio - 'rock and roll nonense' kids listen to, TV - is a wasteland of violence and sex, and the Internet is just a cheaper way to get porno and utter nonsense repeated. McLuhan felt the content was minor compared to how the medium changed our culture and thinking patterns. The book then takes a historical view of the influence of various tools the most important one being the invention and easy reproduction of the book. The book encouraged deep linear thinking that lead to the Renaissance, The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Electronic Revolution. The question the book makes us think about is - will all this stop? What is the Internet doing to our minds as we wander from link to link, page to page, idea to idea, never having a firm and deep foothold on any one topic or idea. How far can mankind go now? Easy access to tetrabytes of facts do not knowledge make. I did not agree with everything but I highly recommend it since it will make you think about the tools you use. -nyguerrillagirl.

Book about Building/Designing/Playing Games

Extra Lives

Everyone who plays videogames does so for different reasons, and there's no better source of argument than trying to pin down the universal reasons for "Why Video Games Matter". It was surprising then to find Extra Lives : Why Video Games Matter by Tim Bissel such an enjoyable and recommendable a read, but a part of that may be a purposeful deception on the author's part.

Initially, I thought it focused on the wrong games, and was a mistaken assessment of gaming's recent accomplishments as an art form. The table of contents read like the movie list of a hardcore film enthusiast…the type of games you'd check off as the "see how far games have come? SEE?" mentality that I found silly when I first saw it and still do today.

But in truth this is a man's personal journey into his relationship with videogames, and Bissel does a fantastic job of pulling us into a mindset so alien to our own with just the right amount of humor, self-deprecation, and even humility. What we read is a candid assessment of a man who has often lived through various amounts of depression, desperation, isolation, and addiction, almost always with a videogame controller at his side. From his bandit killing ventures of the Capital Wasteland to the crime sprees of Liberty City, every account reveals more about the author than it ever could about the games he was playing, and the author knows it.

At the end of the day, if you've never heard of a Master Chief or Solid Snake, and the word videogame conjures up images of Pong or Pac Man, don't expect to understand why you should pick up a controller today. You will, however, understand how people could play the Grand Theft Autos and Mass Effects of the universe, and still go on to be human. And for those who do know their Halo from their Call of Duty, it's still an interesting read into why someone else plays the games you love . . . or even the games you hate.

Final Score: Read the Book! - lafigueroa

Non-Fiction

Broken Genius

I purchased the book Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel N. Shurkin in order to learn more about the man I heard so much about in the 1970's and 80's. During this time period people rarely discussed his contribution to the invention of the transistor but more one his views on intelligence and race.

He was a proponent of Eugenics which advocates for the adoption of policies aimed at improving the gene pool by discouraging certain population groups from reproducing. It was clear that he did not think African Americans which he felt as a group were less intelligent than whites from reproducing. During the time period I mentioned his views where quite controversial and lead to many protests from fellow scientists (Shockley was a physicist and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956) and students. I became interested in him because of the impact of the invention of the transistor and the development of Silicon Valley (Shockley is known as the "Father of Silicon Valley"). I learned something new while reading the book - something I wish I would have "seen" while I was taking Physics in school. I never saw the practical aspects of quantum mechanics other than a way to explain how the atom "kinda" looks. What I learned is how it lead to the development of a better understanding of materials and the development and use of semiconductors and of course my favorite invention of all - the computer. If you look at any book that explains how the transistor works there will certainly be a discussion of Schrödinger's equation and quantum states. I guess if I would have taken more courses in Physics or Electrical Engineering I would have seen it - who knows.

I purchased the book to read after looking up the term "transistor" in Wikipedia. It was disconcerting to the write-up in Wikipedia since the entry allocated more space trying to diminish Shockley's contribution than explaining it. I wondered if it was because how he ended in his career in notoriety over an issue he did not have to take on and pursue. In any case, I discovered he was a brilliant man who actually failed to be identified as a genius (IQ over 135) when he was a youngster (Luis Alvarez another Nobel Laureate was also not picked up in the same IQ study!) I recommend the book to anyone who likes to read science history. -nyguerrillagirl

Griftopia

The book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America is both eye opening and heartbreaking. If communism failed because Marx and Lenin failed to account for some basic and fundamental aspects of human nature then crony capitalism protected by crony politicians will also make our nation tremble and maybe fail unless our elected officials start to take into consideration human nature. It saddens me to read the state of business as usual in all major sectors of our society. Who protects me and you - the main street men and women who get up every morning to work hard so that half of our earnings go to taxes, entitlements (we will never be entitled to), savings (that grows as much as the money I have stashed under the bed), payments for overpriced services in medicine and elsewhere. Who protects us? Why do we vote in the same people year in and year out? We are surrounded by politicians who have more interest in keeping their jobs and only give us words about jobs here, there and overseas. What about the bankers? They get richer and we give us the middle finger. I got a lot from this book - mostly pissed off on how blindly we let the iPads and big screens numb us into thinking we are doing fine but around the corner a huge collapse is eminent one that will not be saved by Bernake and company. What do we do? Entertain ourselves with the nitwits the Republicans offer us to choose from, while the other half feels a smooth talking Democrat who just maintains the status quo is good enough. Do you think the Roman's knew they were declining when the slide started? No. They went on to the coliseums (more so in times of trouble and empty stomachs) and cheered and jeered while the Barbarians bided their time. - nyguerrillagirl

Fiction

A Song of Ice and Fire

I don't know what took me so long to ever start the books in the series A Song of Ice and Fire I managed to read the first four books in the series ...now I know....the HBO series started and I was not going to wait for the next series (they take so long in between) to find out what happened to Ayra and her siblings. The series consist of five books now: "Game of Thrones", "A Clask of Kings", "A Storm of Swords", "A Feast for Crows" and the last one released "A Dance with Dragons." I am not going through the last one quite so quickly as I did the first four. I don't know if I have become disheartened with how some of my favorite characters have been killed or are being severely challenged. The books are engaging and full of plot twists that will make you scream or cry. (Note, I have on occasion thought of stopping my reading and just make my own happy ending...) If you have not started ..then by all means go ahead and pick up the first copy ...you will not stop and all the books are well balanced with respect to action, adventure and heartbreak.
-nyguerrillagirl