{"id":68,"date":"2008-12-16T09:09:04","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T15:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2008-12-16T09:09:34","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T15:09:34","slug":"gift-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/gift-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Gift Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What with Saturnalia and Festivus coming up, I&#8217;ve been buying books. Here are some of the more visually-related titles I&#8217;ve found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mars-3-D-Rovers-Eye-View-Planet\/dp\/1402756208?tag=realtimerenderin\">Mars 3-D<\/a> &#8211; a book of 3D red\/blue stereograms of pictures of Mars. I like the way that you cannot lose the glasses: they&#8217;re built into the cover of the book.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/ABC3D-Marion-Bataille\/dp\/1596434252?tag=realtimerenderin\">ABC3D<\/a> &#8211; Officially a kid&#8217;s alphabet book, it&#8217;s actually a well-crafted (and relatively inexpensive) pop-out book with clever little mechanisms and visual tricks throughout.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Gallop-Scanimation-Picture-Book-Books\/dp\/0761147632?tag=realtimerenderin\">Gallop<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; This one really is a kid&#8217;s book, but the animation mechanism is fun. You can also get a set of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Gallop-Cards-Scanimation-Rufus-Butler\/dp\/0761152393?tag=realtimerenderin\">greeting cards<\/a> of the book. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Swing-Rufus-Butler-Seder\/dp\/0761151273?tag=realtimerenderin\">Swing<\/a> is another by the same author.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>The main reason GPUs are so numerous and so cheap is games, of course. My current addiction is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Left-4-Dead-Pc\/dp\/B000PS4X7S?tag=realtimerenderin\">Left4Dead<\/a>, but I hope to play a lot of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boardgamegeek.com\/browser.php?itemtype=game&amp;sortby=rank\">good\u00a0board games<\/a> during the holiday break. Some books I&#8217;m passing out this year:<\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Game-Design-Workshop-Second-Playcentric\/dp\/0240809742?tag=realtimerenderin\">Game Design Workshop<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; 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 <em>Game Developer<\/em> magazine would gather its game design articles into book form.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Game-Makers-Apprentice-Development-Technology\/dp\/1590596153?tag=realtimerenderin\">The Game Maker&#8217;s Apprentice<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; I hope to lure my younger son into making simple videogames with this, a good book of tutorials for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yoyogames.com\/make\">Gamemaker software<\/a>, which itself is free to download.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/One-Jump-Ahead-Computer-Perfection\/dp\/0387765751?tag=realtimerenderin\">One Jump Ahead<\/a> &#8211; About a computer program to play checkers and so much more, by the person who eventually solved checkers. Longer review <a href=\"http:\/\/home.roadrunner.com\/~haines\/books.html\">here<\/a>. I just love this book on so many levels. I don&#8217;t know what the new edition adds; the older edition is noticeably cheaper on <a href=\"http:\/\/product.half.ebay.com\/One-Jump-Ahead_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ469496\">half.com<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>OK, enough diversion from the main topic of this blog; I&#8217;ll get back to that next post.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What with Saturnalia and Festivus coming up, I&#8217;ve been buying books. Here are some of the more visually-related titles I&#8217;ve found: Mars 3-D &#8211; a book of 3D red\/blue stereograms of pictures of Mars. I like the way that you cannot lose the glasses: they&#8217;re built into the cover of the book. ABC3D &#8211; Officially [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16,119,118,120],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-books","tag-checkers","tag-games","tag-optical-illusions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}