Gift Books

Eric — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:09:04 +0000

What with Saturnalia and Festivus coming up, I’ve been buying books. Here are some of the more visually-related titles I’ve found:

Mars 3-D – a book of 3D red/blue stereograms of pictures of Mars. I like the way that you cannot lose the glasses: they’re built into the cover of the book.
ABC3D – Officially a kid’s alphabet book, it’s actually a well-crafted (and relatively inexpensive) pop-out book with clever little mechanisms and visual tricks throughout.
Gallop - This one really is a kid’s book, but the animation mechanism is fun. You can also get a set of greeting cards of the book. Swing is another by the same author.

The main reason GPUs are so numerous and so cheap is games, of course. My current addiction is Left4Dead, but I hope to play a lot of good board games during the holiday break. Some books I’m passing out this year:

Game Design Workshop - My older son hopes to do a class project of designing a board game, and this looks like a book that will help. I wish Game Developer magazine would gather its game design articles into book form.
The Game Maker’s Apprentice - I hope to lure my younger son into making simple videogames with this, a good book of tutorials for the Gamemaker software, which itself is free to download.
One Jump Ahead – About a computer program to play checkers and so much more, by the person who eventually solved checkers. Longer review here. I just love this book on so many levels. I don’t know what the new edition adds; the older edition is noticeably cheaper on half.com.

OK, enough diversion from the main topic of this blog; I’ll get back to that next post.

Real-Time Rendering » optical illusions

Gift Books