I purchased a Barnes & Noble Nook on Tuesday evening and so far my user experience of the device and the website has been thoroughly underwhelming to say the least.

Where do I start? Okay, let’s begin with the device itself. It feels cheap and plastic and even though the screen is a smidgeon larger than the one on my SONY PRS-505 e-book reader it actually appears smaller due to the design of the bezel.

Currently I have Oscar Wilde’s drug addled, half-lidded caricature staring back at me from the screen whilst it sits in standby mode. This is most certainly a feature I hope I can switch off – I remember seeing a related option under the configuration menu so I will be investigating that very soon.

Update: No way to switch off the feature completely, I can have “nature” or “authors” or “city scapes” but not actually just blank the screen. A minor annoyance but frankly I’d really like the option to switch off the background completely.

The packaging was utterly dreadful. It seems that Barnes & Noble went for a “unique user experience” but when I describe it as worse than the Windows Vista packaging you will hopefully understand what I mean. I have never in my life ever purchased a product that gave me pause for thought to actually consider using Google to locate instructions on how to get the stupid fucking device out of the box it came in. I cannot imagine an elderly Grandmother ever figuring out how to extract the e-book reader from the box. I swear I came close to snapping the device in half trying to remove the plastic backing mount from it.

God forbid that you should buy one of these devices for a journey, only to open the device up at the airport ready for some hot reading action to realise you need a computer, with internet connection, to actually be able to use it for what it was meant for, i.e. reading books. Why Barnes & Noble couldn’t have let you register for a B&N account directly on the device, without the need for a computer leaves me scratching my head.

As far as the Barnes & Noble website goes, I never thought I would encounter a more poorly implemented bookstore web application than the one that SONY has for their devices but Barnes & Nobles, I congratulate on utterly failing to be better than Borders/SONY bookstore.

Barnes & Noble’s website experience is sloooowww. I mean, really slow. Like, 56K modem slow. I’ve tried using it on a number of different computers, including my utter beast of a workstation, and various high-speed internet connections in different cities at different times and it just crawls. This isn’t a case of the website undergoing maintenance, this is just a slow, slow, slow website that needs some serious infrastructure work.

The user interface experience on the website is dreadful, requiring so many clicks to actually browse for and purchase a book that your impulse purchases will have utterly evaporated long before you ever click “download.”

The B&N bookstore website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox, many features are broken due to poor coding of CSS, including the search box. I suspect that it is geeks that are primarily buying the Nook and if that is the case, then they are most likely running Firefox or Safari, surely you should ensure your website actually works for the people who are buying your product?

Your personal book library on the website is managed through a Flash application which is rather poorly implemented. It frequently crashes, runs sluggishly slow, animates various pop-ups for no particular reason, forces you to navigate your library in a single small window – God forbid you should actually have, you know, a few hundred e-books – fails to remember options you have set such as zoom level, sort order, or many other settings. Again, because the website is so slow, the Flash application responds with appropriate sluggishness.

I’ve spent only a few hours with the device, and I am currently considering returning it to the bookstore where I purchased it and asking for a refund. It really is a sad little device with a poor end-user experience. I really was hoping for a better user experience than my SONY PRS-505 but unfortunately, this isn’t it.

I really wanted to like this device. I really wanted to replace my PRS-505, but I am really disappointed in the whole end-to-end user experience, from the packaging, to the device, to the website. Because of these problems it really colours my thoughts and final judgement of what the device is for: reading books. Yes, it lets me do that just fine, but the rest of the experience is just so poor that I would rather stick with the devil I know than use a new device that has questionable longevity and an even more questionable user-experience.

Maybe in a few years I will take another look at the Barnes & Noble Nook, but I will be returning the device to the store just a few days after purchase because it is plainly and simply a dreadful thing to inflict on anyone who loves reading books.

For now I will be sticking with the SONY PRS-505 and Calibre software until either the SONY Daily Edition or the Kindle DX prove themselves viable alternatives.

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Occasionally you get halfway through a book and start thinking to yourself “when is the author going to tell me how to use this technology to create something cool?” With PHP Game Programming, by Matt Rutledge, I had that feeling right up until the last page. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert PHP programmer—not by a long shot—and Rutledge sure knows his onions from years spent as a web developer and database programmer, so as a beginning text to PHP this book is reasonably good. It’s aimed at beginning to intermediate developers interested in broadening their game development skills.

It is the coverage of game programming that causes the book to really fall down. The subject of PHP Game Programming would have been cutting-edge in 1994 when the World Wide Web was a new frontier and “on-line gaming” on the Internet consisted of dynamically generated pages using CGI Perl scripts to maintain the state. Today, the techniques presented are really nothing more than an interesting footnote of how not to create web-based games. Rutledge knows his stuff, but his book is nine years too late. Following the basic introduction to PHP, he develops a couple of HTML games—tic-tac-toe and a simple chess game driven by a non-relational database that stores the possible moves. Once the basics of PHP and HTML are covered, Rutledge moves on to develop “more sophisticated” games, such as an Artillery clone that lets you lob cannonballs at your opponent over a hill by setting elevation and power. A sort of thinking man’s version of “guess the number” that utilizes the third-party GD graphics library to generate images in “real time.” These images are served as each player enters their moves using a standard HTML form. I wrote an Artillery-like game for the unexpanded 2K Acorn Atom in 1978, and it was more interesting than Rutledge’s version. Mine even had animated explosions and sound—more than can be said for the version presented in this book. This isn’t to reflect on either Rutledge’s or my own programming prowess, just an observation of the suitability of the technology used to solve a problem.

In chapter 10, Rutledge demonstrates the use of sockets by creating a persistent server and dedicated client that he later develops this into what he terms a “massively multiplayer online game.” To be honest, though, I would be hard-pressed to consider using PHP to create a persistent server for any game that I expected to support massive numbers of players.

Of the exceedingly few cool features in the book, the section covering dynamic generation of Flash movies certainly stands out as something rather neat. This section provides a reasonable introduction to the concept, but then fails to develop it. Other than learning how to draw a few lines and boxes on the screen, no space is given to developing interesting games or even ideas that use the technique. I can only think of a few uses for this scheme: protecting Flash movies (there are other equally adequate ways of doing this, however) and streaming dynamic content from a database (though the newer versions of Flash include this capability). I’m sure there are some very cool ideas that could make use of this dynamic content generation, it’s a shame the author never explores any of them in the text.

As an introductory text to the PHP language, PHP Game Programming is adequate. If you’re looking to learn PHP programming, however, I’d personally recommend reading one or more of several PHP books published by O’Reilly.

VERDICT

PHP Game Programming

Author: Matt Rutledge
Publisher: Premier Press (Thomson/Course Technology)
ISBN: 1-59200-153-X
Pages: 356

Rating

4 out of 10

Pros

1. A gentle introduction to PHP programming.
2. CD-ROM contains all the tools you’ll need to explore the examples.
3. CD-ROM contains working source to all of the examples.

Cons

1. Lacks punch in its coverage of games.
2. The games presented were technologically backward in 1995.
3. Needs more concrete examples of why you should use PHP for game development.

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I have to state this upfront, I enjoyed reading this next book, but constantly kept wondering when the author, Mike McShaffry, would talk about the “Game Coding Complete” aspects that I was expecting based on the title. I picked the book up looking for Steve McConnell’s Code Complete (Microsoft Press) worked from a game developer’s perspective, but it never seemed to step up to the plate.

Game Coding Complete is a generic, non-API specific game programming book that attempts to educate the reader with the ins and outs of the game industry and what goes into making a game from a production viewpoint. With 563 pages, the book isn’t long enough to cover the entire development process in-depth, and many of the sections barely touch on what are essentially very deep subjects. And the chapters on 3D graphics and game engines are woefully inadequate.

From the beginning “What’s in a game?” chapter detailing many of the technologies and processes that go to creating a game from scratch, McShaffry covers 2D graphics, detouring in to a game’s initialization phase and the main loop, then sidelines to loading game data and caching it before returning, in roundabout fashion, to 3D graphics and game engines, confusing game engines and graphics engines at more than one point (probably more due to poor phrasing than actual confusion on McShaffry’s part). Beyond these few brief technological sections the book offers a glimpse at considerations you must pay to writing games for Microsoft Windows. The last three chapters wrap up the book by detailing how to debug games—a topic better served by other books on the market—scheduling and some of the pitfalls with that subject, and finally quality assurance.

Game Coding Complete meanders from one subject to another in no particular order, never being in-depth enough to really drive home a point; never insightful enough to give that “aha!” moment when the author points out the blindingly obvious that you should have known all along. The book offers very little to the seasoned professional even though the back cover clearly states “Intermediate to Advanced” as its target audience.

The book is littered with McShaffry’s experiences—dubbed “Tales from the pixel mines”—working in the game industry since 1990 where he started at Origin Systems, and it covers what I feel is his narrow experience and field of expertise, primarily DOS & Windows with the Ultima series of games. The anecdotes are amusing, and made the book enjoyable for me as I was often nodding knowingly—”Yup! Been there! Done that!”—as I read through it and they certainly helped keep the book from being dull and dry.

Game Coding Complete bounces around the technical areas so fast it’s more of an overview of what makes a game from a programmer’s viewpoint. It’s very difficult to explain the in-depth inner workings of a 3D engine in 50 pages or less—annotated with code—and still have it be useful to anyone. The book is neither a good process book nor a good programming book.
Unusually, this book contains no example CD containing the code contained in the pages; instead it offers a web site that holds the entire source, hopefully with working examples that are debugged. I wouldn’t know for sure, as when I went to the URL the web server gave me a timeout while attempting connection. The web site solution is good and bad. Good because you hopefully get the latest debugged version of the code. Bad, because in 5 years time, when you want the code again, the website may be long gone and there might be nobody at the publisher who knows what you’re talking about.

For an aspiring game programmer, it’s worth reading, but a seasoned developer of two or three years experience won’t take much away from this book.

This book review originally appeared April 20th, 2004 on Gamasutra, the official webzine of Game Developer Magazine that I write for regularly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike McShaffry began his gaming career at Origin Systems in 1990. In his seven years there, Mike contributed variously as a programmer, lead programmer, director and producer to titles including Martian Dreams, Ultima VII, Ultima VIII, Ultima IX and Ultima Online, and consulted on many other popular Origin and Electronic Arts games. Since the Origin days Mike has worked on a wide variety of games; everything from Mattel’s Magnadoodle to Microsoft’s Bicycle Casino 2001. Mike co-founded Compulsive Development in January 200 and completed four casual games for Microsoft before being acquired by Glass Eye Entertainment. Mike’s responsibilities as Director of Software Development for Glass Eye include strategic management of programming and production.

VERDICT

Game Coding Complete

Author: Mike McShaffry
Publisher: Paraglyph Publishing
ISBN: 1932111751
Pages: 563
Rating

6 out of 10

Pros

1. Amusing anecdotes.
2. Easy conversational style that makes for a fast read.
3. Useful to people curious about the games development industry.

Cons

1. Has very little in-depth information.
2. Attempts to cover too much ground in a single volume.
3. Misleading book title for those expecting “Coding Complete.”

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