I’ve been doing a ton of reading lately, so here are some more book reviews.
Almost Perfect
A book by W. E. Peterson, one of the head-honchos behind Word Perfect wrote this book quite a while ago (~’92 or ‘93). Almost Perfect is out of print, but the full text is available online, which is where I read it. The book tells the story (from Peterson’s perspective) of how the little company was founded, handled it’s exponential growth, and how things ended when he left (at which time WP was still a big player and OS/2 still looks like it might matter). A very interesting read.
Racing the Beam
A book out of MIT, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies) is the first book in a series (which I can’t wait to read more of) that gives a very in depth discussion of the Atari VCS/2600, and how it’s design both allowed games to be far more advanced that originally planned, but could also be very limited (causing things like the infamous Pac-Mac port). The book dissects a couple of games (Yar’s Revenge, Pitfall, Pac-Mac, and a few more), showing how the games were changed or invented to work around (or take advantage of) limitations in the system’s architecture. I’ve never read such a technical discussion of how a platform and it’s games were tied for such old systems, which is supposed to be the point of the series. I really enjoyed this book, I just wish it was longer and covered more games.
The Design of Everyday Things
The last book I’m going to write a mini-review of here is The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve been meaning to read this for a few years since I first saw some discussions about it and it is a very worthwhile read. Some of the suggestions in the book about ways to improve computer interfaces are interesting, considering they were written in 1990 and many of the suggestions have been incorporated by now. The author does a very good job explaining what kind of things to look out for when designing interfaces to things (it’s not computer specific at all, it’s mostly about physical objects) in a way that will be easily usable by people without causing all sorts of undue confusion.
