Previously I had written about Defect Injection. That post described a tool called Jester written by Al Sweigart. Recently I stumbled upon a free book written by Al entitled “Invest Your Own Computer Games with Python”. He provides a free PDF download of this book on his web site. He also has a free online version. This seemed like quite a contribution to the programming community.The book had a number of interesting chapters such as Hello World, Tic Tac Toe, Caesar Cipher, and AI Simulation. Right now I am not a Python developer. But I have heard the buzz about the language. Sometime in the future I may be interested in picking it up. I thought maybe I would sign up for a community college class on it to get me to learn it. However it sounds fun to go through Al’s book since the application is computer games. You can’t beat the price.
From his bio, Al lives in San Francisco. He seems to have many assorted interests. Some of them include volunteering and making useful software. That seems to match what I’ve seen. He has a blog which he “tries to keep terse”.
I too have written some software on the side of my day job. And I distribute it free of charge. Maybe I need to write a useful book as well. But who has the time? I spend a good deal of time publishing some blogs of different subjects. Now if I did have the time, I wonder what the topic of my book would be? Perhaps Software Maintenance.
