Our Books

efgThis site has been the birth-place of several books on software development.  The first was The Essential Guide To Flash Games, released in 2010, published by Apress/Friends Of Ed.

This book was born out the tutorials we posted on the site in the four previous years.  All new and previously unpublished material, the book covered writing Flash games from the ground-up using  all the skills we had mastered building games over the previous decade.

The book was published in the height of “Flash Game Era”, and it shows.   One of the chapters covers “viral Flash Games”, and instructs budding game developers how to publish their games with viral advertisements on the now defunct (but beloved) Mochi Games platform.

This book was supposed to include information on publishing to iOS devices.  However, just a few days before the text was being finalized, Steve Jobs announced that “Flash would never be on the iPad”.  This threw us, and the publisher for a loop.    However, all ended well.   Flash still had a few good years left in it after this , and unlike 90% of the books published every years it went on to make a profit.

We still get emails about this book, from people trying to learn to make games in Flash.  It’s always nice to hear from people who have been inspired to make their own creations from the information provided.

In the process of promoting the book, we created this fake “Infomercial” for it an posted it on Youtube.com.  This was at the time of “The Snuggie”  which at the time we felt was the best/worst product ever made.  See if you can spot “The Snuggie” hidden in the video.

  • Play The 10 Games In The Book (most of them still work! You need Flash installed and running in your browser  though).  You will notice many of them they all have a very “retro” feel.   Sue us, that’s what we like.
 

html5.Our 2nd book was HTML5 Canvas  , published by O’Reilly in 2011.  This book came directly from our experience with Steve Jobs, Flash, and our first book, The Essential Guide To Flash Games.   It became apparent to us that Flash, running in a browser, was going to disappear.

We were not happy about this.  Both of  us has spent the previous 10 years basing our careers on building kids entertainment web sites and games in Flash.  However, with the writing on the wall, we looked for what might be the “replacement” for Flash and we found it in the HTML5 Canvas.

This was actually the first book ever published on the subject and led to speaker slots for us at several DevCon 5 developer conventions and a few teaching engagements at major corporations.

It was a very popular title for O’Reilly, and spent a few days in the #1 Slot on the Amazon Game Programming charts in 2011.  It sold well enough that O’Reilly awarded us with framed covers of the book to commemorate  sales (photo to the right)

In what we felt was a salute to our old favorite technology, we dedicated the book “To Flash”.   We thought it was cute and irreverent, until our dad died three months later, and  we wished we had dedicated it to him instead.

Our third book was the 2nd Edition of HTML Canvas, released in 2013.   The book was completely overhauled, and we added 30% new content.  This version of the book was even more popular than the first.  It was translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Korean (and possibly other languages).

It is now used as a text book and is still in print, almost four years later.

Also, We came to our senses with this one, and dedicated it our dad.

The source code the 2nd edition is available here:

Future Books?

Anything is possible.  One of us has been working on a generation-x memoir based on the Atari Memoirs series on this site, but as for technical books, we will have to see might interest us in the future.

Want to read the full story of ho these books came together?  See the Stories below

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