10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Before my Game Design class went completely downhill, the professor recommended this book to us.  She said that it had an interesting relation to one of the programs that we were learning and commented on the development on games.  If the book had cost any money, I probably would have passed but it was free from MIT Press, so I downloaded it and decided to read it eventually.

 

The book is named after a one line program in BASIC, an older programing language.  The program fills up the screen with a random maze and keeps running until the user exits the program.  The program contains several elements that are frowned upon in modern day programming practices but that is neither here nor there.

This book has a really interesting structure.  It takes 10 PRINT (the shortened version of the titular program) and analyzes that in great, painstaking detail.  Then the book spirals outward from there. In its spiral, it touches a variety of topics ranging from mazes to the history of the Commodore 64.

While this book was pretty interesting to me, I feel it would be significantly less so to someone who did not major in Computer Science.  While it covers many things that certainly do not require a computer science degree to comprehend, my eyes glazed over during some of the discussions of porting 10 PRINT to other platforms.

An interesting note about the book, all of the authors collaborated on it, wiki style.  I did not really notice any drastic changes in voice or writing style while I was reading, but the book is pretty short.  A longer book may have made those issues more apparent.

Overall, I would give this book an 86%.