More books, updates

I made another venture to the Seattle Central Library recently, either it’s such a big and popular library that everything good is always checked out, or they just are pretty lacking in a good amount of computer/technology/programming books. I think more the latter. DeVry with about 5 rows of books (and still only 2-4 shelf columns) had a much better selection than all of the Seattle Public Library. Oh well, I found some interesting and decent books anyway.
One was an old (1994) book on C++ Object Oriented Design. It was interesting because it was a company book of design standards for their in-house development. However, most of it was pretty broad and I gathered a couple good points out of it. For instance, on using typedefs (which I rarely did so now I know why to), having the client create and send their own variables as parameters instead of creating and returning a new object, and some other issues about cross-platform development and good OO design.
Then I checked out “How Not To Program In C++”, a fun book basically of short sample problems that have an error in them. It’s like a puzzle/detective book and you try to find out the error (you get some hints and all the answers are in the back).

What I really wanted though was the next two books I’ve recently checked out, one “Interactive Computer Graphics A Top-Down Approach With OpenGL” is actually a well put together (so far) advanced book on computer graphics. Prior to reading it (and because it was raining so I didn’t want to ride my bike home and I can only check out 5 books at a time right now), I read an oooold book that was right next to it on the shelf–”Computer Graphics Definitions” from 1984. The interesting thing about this book, is it had a mix of TV and movie technology as well as upcoming 3D computer graphics technology that was mostly theory then. Or that most of the 3D computer technology comes from a lot of old theory. I finally learned what those Bezier Curves comes from.
The final book I’ve got, “The Essential Blender” , goes pretty well with the other book I got. I picked this up due to my lack of internet access for a week and the not-so-great quality of a lot of the blender tutorials out there. I like how the book is written and I’m moving quite along with it.

Anyhow, after these I want to find a book or something on cross-platform development and networking (multiplayer game) programming.

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