Someone kindly bought me two programming manuals from Waterstone's today. Some may know the Waterstone's carrier bags feature famous book-related quotes. On my bag it says "Their is no friend as loyal as a book". Well, yes. Books are inanimate. They aren't even mechanical. If you are one to make friends with inanimate objects, this statement is perfectly true, but would be better phrased as "There is no friend less capable of betraying you than a book". It's not true for me, as books betray me regularly, ever since Lee Scoresby died. (Yes, Lee Scoresby dies.) Well done Ernet Hemingway.
One of my books is called "Teach Yourself Games Programming". I got it not because I want to be able to program games but because unlike every person who has ever written a programming manual, I know SYNTAX DOES NOT COUNT FOR SHIT. I was relatively fluent in BASIC (Shut up, my family is rooted in BASIC) and I still needed help to make a program that essentially functioned as a Tamagotchi. Seriously, simplest program ever! In VISUAL BASIC! Why? Because no-one ever taught me to program. they taught me languages. Languages don't mean shit. I'm hoping this book will teach me how to make games. Because, games are programs. And I can absorb some of this programming skill. Anyway, if you;re learning from a book, you are not teaching yourself. You;re learning from a book. And it's impossible to teach yourself almost anything. What am I meant to do? Enter random words into an IDE and see what comes out? The "goal" is apparently "great gaming". No, the GOAL is to PROGRAM games. If you want great gaming, get a copy of Arcanum. Not a book on programming. You will never beat that game. Apparently they also do a book on BLOGGING. You can't LEARN to blog. If you can type in a comprehensible language, you can blog. You'll either have something interesting to say, or not. If you even try to get a book to teach you this, it's a not. I also quite like the "why not try flash 8". Because Flash is for pussies. There are three things flash is good for. Flash animations, extremely simple games beatable in a few minutes you'll never want to play again. Neither of those is relevant to someone who, according to the into "Wants a sustained career (guys, this means MONEY, not an option in flash) in game development." There's no money in flash because so few people are stupid enough to pay for something written in flash. Which is for pussies. Why not learn to program like a real man? (Again, there is only one programming language that's actually useful nowadays, C. It's portable, compiled, efficient and GUI capable. If anyone can tell me of another language that fits that, I'm interested. (Not Java, Java is ALSO for pussies) It;s about time someone DID replace C, because it fucking sucks. No-one will teach me C. All the books I have on C start out by telling me how much C sucks, and move on to telling me why. Then they have an appendix on syntax. I couldn't even work out how to make a character array.)
Visual Basic is a contender, because it;s uh, visual. And visual is synonymous with "Not going to fuck your ass every time you try to make a GUI." And that's IMPORTANT. Very, very, very important. Because "No GUI" is synonymous with "almost useless".
Seriously, imagine the GIMP had no GUI. Useless. Imagine my IM program with no GUI. Useless. VB falls down in that it's not portable. Which means all your Visual Basic programs are only of use to people who use Windows. Commonly known as "Laymen".
The other book I got was PHP in 10 minutes. Each lesson is 10 minutes. there is more than one lesson. SAMS Teach Yourself (also not teaching yourself) are retarded! On the back it claims you can use PHP to "Make your web-pages Dynamic" and a a load of other stuff... all of which is uh, making your page dynamic. In fact, the third item down is "make HTML pages dynamically". Uh.... Yeah. And what is "PEAR"? Like LAMP but darker? Or, a WINDOWS version of LAMP! (Lamp= Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, theoretically everything you need on a web-server.) It could be... Pile-of-crapOS, Ediot-user, a-fuckload-of-RAM, rectum. Everything you need to turn your computer on! (idiot is a person stupid enough to spell idiot with an e, and use windows, the fuckload of ram is to waste your money on stuff you wouldn't need in Linux, and the rectum is to get fucked daily from the second you sign the license agreement). Inside the book it sais yu do not, and will not need to know HTML. Dude, if you are not already hand-coding HTML, you don't DESERVE PHP. And you'll never get t anyway. I hand-code HTML CSS and JS for my pages (except JS, because the only real use for JS in my field is displaying the time. I trust my users to be able to LOOK AT THE FUCKING SYSTEM CLOCK) (BTW, There are little links at the top of my blog-editor that put links, bold, etc in for me. I never use them, because I'm so cool, I can type "a" and "b" and triangular brackets myself. Atashi wa oki na shojou da.)
I'm very enthusiastic about my new books. I'm just practicing my cynicism.