Book reviews
Introduction
I am a bookworm with quite wide ranging interests and since I read a lot of books and have a strong opinion about them, I thought it might be a good idea to share those opinions, hence this webpage.
Each short review has a link to a somewhat more detailed review and clicking on an image of a book cover refers you to the Amazon site. (That is a convenience for you I hope and might earn me a few cents). You can select either amazon.com or amazon.co.uk as the site to refer to, but you're free of course to go to any bookseller you prefer.
Note that Blender books have now their own review page with a subject-by-subject comparision of their contents.
This is quite a long page but you may navigate quickly to a relevant section by using the links to the right. Enjoy!
Latest books
Here's an eclectic mix of books I'm reading or have read recently.
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 Plenty information but no focus. |
Well written, concise, complete. |
Good but rather short introduction. |
Fantastic but very human tales. |
Blender books
Blender is open source software to create and animate 3D scenes and games of exceptional quality. It compares favourably to many expensive packages and has a sizeable and growing community of enthousiastic users and developers. In the last couple of years Blender even enjoys the attention of serious publishers and this has resulted in a number of well written books. However, this attention also led to less gifted authors to jump on the bandwagon. Most of the books in my list though are good value for money.
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| Plenty information but no focus. |
At last a book that helps you actually finish a project! |
Absolutely more than just an introduction. |
Realistic simulation made easy. |
Programming books
I am not a programmer by profession but over the years I cobbled together quite some programs, most of them in C or Perl. In the last couple of years however, my interest in Blender shifted my attention to Python , Blenders built-in scripting language. Now Python is certainly a well documented and popular proqramming language with many resources available on the web but I still like to read an oldfashioned book now and again. Here are a couple of interesting ones:
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| Well written, concise, complete. |
A practical guide to datamining in web 2.0 |
Tech writing is an art, this author ain't got the talent. |
Science books
A background in chemistry and physics certainly colors my preferences in non-fiction books but nowadays my interests are more diverse, something that translates in the number of books on wide ranging topics as linguistics, philosophy and biology.
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| Good but rather short introduction. |
Fascinating overview of eusocial insects. |
Fiction books
My science preferences extend to my choice in fiction boohs although the SF is sometimes exchanged for fantasy.
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| Fantastic but very human tales. |