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Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game At A Time! (Book Review)

Realm of Racket is an informative new book that will teach would be game designers the language and programming skills needed to begin creating their own gaming adventures in Racket software. The book released this month and comes from a collaboration of authors that include Professor Matthias Felleisen, original creator and master software programmer behind Racket language. The professor has won several prestigious awards for his contributions to language, programming and related technological fields, and Professor Felleisen was joined on the project by eight of the brightest programming students where he teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The highly detailed and informative book also includes contributions from Conrad Barski M.D., from the University of Miami and research professor David Van Horn. The team worked together on Realm of Racket to create a book that is great for teaching beginners language and coding rules that will be beneficial in the future as well as give established programmers a nice refresher.

There are over 300 pages worth of content crammed into Realm of Racket. The content includes all of the information beginners will learn in a typical semester of learning at a professional university classroom setting including introductions to Racket, Lisp and the various syntax, semantics, strings of coding, conditions, variables, decisions, functions and other content that creates the language that produces a game for the programming on a screen. The book includes an introduction section, 14 unique chapters covering the wide variety of content named above and a closing, and by the time the reader has finished reading and following all of the detailed instructions within the pages, many different games will have been created that are both fully functional and pretty fun to play. The book begins with simplistic coding and programming to create games such as guess a number but ends with some pretty complex ideas that will prove the reader has fully grasped the previously taught concepts.

Realm of Racket has an excellent layout that easily guides readers into the programming language even with no prior experience with it or any other coding language for that matter. Gamers typically have active imaginations that make it more difficult to concentrate for long periods of time, but luckily, Realm of Racket includes plenty of special stories shared by the author based off of real life experiences and fictional stories told through comic strips and cartoons throughout the text. The fun idea keeps the book interesting for readers at all time, or they can be totally ignored when trying to finish up a section of a game or chapter. There are also other special additions in the book including chapter challenges that offer increasingly difficult tasks for the reader to perform on their games and code in a Trophy/Achievement like fashion.

One glaring problem with the book is that is focuses primarily on the Racket programming language, and many users may not be interested in this specific type of coding as their first choice, since it is not one of the more popular available. Still, it is undoubtedly a good place for aspiring game designers to begin learning to create games, and this point cannot be overstated. Learning another language is never easy, even in programming and coding, but Realm of Racket comes from teachers and students that know how teach others to use Racket and know the best tips for mastering its intricacies. Racket also provides all the tools a designer needs to incorporate into a new generation of gaming from the simple controls and sprite choices to setting up servers for online multiplayer sessions. Realm of Racket has game designers covered and is well worth looking into if you've ever wanted to learn to create your own video games. Purchase your copy of Realm of Racket today!

For more information or to purchase a copy of Realm of Racket, check out the official O'Reilly website.

Book Information:
Authors: Matthias Felleisen, Conrad Barski M.D., David Van Horn & Eight Students of Northeastern University
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: June 2013
Genre: Instructional/Tutorial
Pages: 312

Score: 8 out of 10


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