Acorn Heroes

Me: “Hi, my name’s George”

Everyone: “Hi George!”

Me: “My name’s George, and I’m a book addict.  I love reading and I just can’t get enough.”

Yep, I’m a book nerd, a big one.  And from discussions with my fellow iDevBlogADay-ers, I’m not the only one.  While the Internet is a great place to find a wealth of information, sometimes a book is the only place you can really cover a subject with the attention it deserves.  I have a few favourites, and after reading this week’s post from Markus, I felt I should share.

Obviously, there’s the standard sources for good books – Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders.  But here’s a couple of options I prefer that you might not know of.  O’Reilly have an online subscription service called Safari.  Depending on your subscription, you get 5 or more books that you can have complete access to at any one time.  There’s a large selection of publishers, all making their books available in an online form.  Often books are available here before publication in a ‘beta’ form, which is great in a fast moving industry like ours.

Another one you may not have heard of is The Pragmatic Bookshelf – who publish a range of books including a growing range of iOS related titles.  What’s really cool is that they offer books in both electronic and paper forms, and at any time you can log in and re-download a copy of any book you’ve purchased through them, in PDF, ePub or mobi formats.  Once again, ‘beta’ versions of books are available.  The place is also run by Gerbils, which is unusual these days.

The Pragmatic guys frequently run special promotions, and it’s quite common to get up to 50% off many titles.  In particular if you sign up and then recommend a friend to sign up, you’ll both immediately get 40% off coupons to redeem on any purchase.  If you don’t have any friends who are sufficiently book-nerdy like you and me, drop me a line at george.sealy ‘at’ gmail.com and I’ll send you an invite so we can both enjoy a discount

OK, enough prattle.  Here’s a small selection of  great books that I own and would happily recommend to anyone.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  If you want to learn how games are designed, and how to make great games yourself, then this is the book for you.  Throughout the book, Jesse provides a collection of lenses.  Each lens captures one aspect of game design and provides a series of questions you can ask yourself about a game.  Typically the answers to these question provid insight into why certain aspects of a game aren’t working, and what can be done to improve it.

In the spirit of try before you buy, there are several chapters available on line for you to read.  Or read this review.

If you’re new to iOS programming, this book will quickly become your best friend.  The book is well written and introduces XCode, Interface Builder and the iPhone SDK in a clear and useful way.  Many books give you an exact sequence of steps to follow to achieve a particular result, leaving you unsure how to do anything else.  This book though gives you enough understanding to branch out and try things on your own.  This book is often sitting on my desk when I’m working on iOS projects.  This book is also available on Safari, along with many of the other good Apress iOS books.

I found this book before I’d ever heard of Joel Spolsky, and his test, which changed the way I go about software development.  In this book he describes his no nonsense approach to UI design.  The chapter names alone convey a wealth of information, for example Design for Extremes and People Can’t Read.  If you haven’t heard of Joel yet, set aside a few hours and head on over to his site and start working through some of his reading lists of articles, which includes most of the content from the book, so there’s no excuse for not reading this.

Jason Gregory is an industry veteran, and it shows.  If you have any interest in how a game engine is put together then you’ll like this one.  You’ll get a high level view of all the parts that make up an engine and how they interact along with specific examples from well known game engines – including the open source OGRE and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted engine.  While the book is based on Jason’s experience with PC and PS3 platforms, there’s plenty of valuable insight here that can be applied anywhere.  This book is particularly good if you are new to game programming – the older hands will probably find a lot that’s familiar – along with a few ideas that are new and useful.

If there is a trend in my book choices, it is for clear, easy to read books.  The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those books that can be flicked through and read a section at a time.  It distills the experience and insight of the author into bite-sized chunks of wisdom that can help you be a better programmer.  This book isn’t so much about programming as it is about how you as a programmer approach your work, and how you can be more efficient and effective.  If I ever have enough money to employ people, this book will be required reading for all programmers.

I’m an addict, but it’s a reasonably harmless addiction that I’m willing to share. All of these books have a permanent place on my office bookshelf.  What are your favourites?  Let me know in the comments below, I’m always looking for my next fix!