I just came across one of the best bargains I’ve ever had.

To prepare for an abstract algebra exam which I’m having on Monday, I planned to buy a copy of Schaum’s Outline of Abstract Algebra, which I heard contains a lot of solved problems. To my knowledge, only one major bookstore chain sells Schaum’s Outlines here in Manila, so I went to a mall which supposedly has a branch of that bookstore.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the bookstore no longer operates in that mall! However, there was a sale going on in the entire mall, so I decided to visit one of the computer book stores to see what they had to offer.

And I ended up buying the following books:

So instead of paying P7382 for all those books, I just had to pay P1100 – more than 85% discount!

This had to be one of the best deals ever. If I had more money on hand, I would’ve bought more books :) .

Of course, Game Programming Gems 2 is considered as a standard resource in game development. Just skimming the table of contents gives you an idea of the wealth of information contained in the volume. However, I probably won’t be able to utilize this book in the meantime – but it’s good to have it readily available.

I got a copy of Game Creation: No Programming Required 2/E because I’m very much interested in rapid prototyping of games, which I believe this book will help me with. Even though I’m familiar with programming, I think that being familiar with a non-programming approach to game development would help me view game development not as purely programming but as a multi-disciplinary activity.

Of course, I’m hoping that Video Game Art would eventually help me graduate from “programmer art,” :) and loosen my dependence on third-party art libraries. Although the book uses 3D Studio Max and Photoshop (which are beyond my reach financially), I’m still hoping that I will be able to apply the concepts presented to other art packages.

Among the four, I’m probably going to spend most of my time with Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia. I find Squeak quite intriguing, and I’ve always been impressed with the ideas behind it. I think that one of the things which Squeak and scriptedfun have in common is their aim to make creation of interactive content more accessible to everyone. Also, I think that Squeak will be useful to my profession as a math teacher. I’m hoping that this book will allow me to make fun games with Squeak, and hopefully help others make their own fun games easily.

I can’t wait to start on these! In the meantime, I’ll be working on Hungerford… ;)