Foundations of Graphics & Compute - Volume 2: Rendering (Hardback)

An enjoyable and informative read, though it could have been shorter.

I read this over a couple of weekends alongside a small side project, which turned out to be the ideal way to approach it. The explanations are careful without being condescending, which is a difficult balance to strike. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. I particularly liked the way the author builds up from simple cases before introducing the harder material. The author is unusually honest about where the simplifications break down, which I appreciated. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.

Finally, a book that treats javascript with the care it deserves.

I have been working with javascript for a few years now and I still found plenty here that was new to me. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. This is the book I wish had existed when I started working with javascript.