Title: Videogame Marketing and PR
Author: Scott Steinberg
The book is clearly aimed at development studios. It is basically a compilation of suggestions, success stories, usual mistakes and recommendations related with marketing and public relations in the videogame industry.
It is interesting however for a more broad audience to read it and learn how difficult is creating a videogame this days. The book contains money sums, stime chedules, estimates of team people numbers, handicaps... I like too the real-world examples that any avid gamer will notice.
Some sections are like a big speech, others are a group of points, and others have a question-answer format. A chapter with advices from the industry professionals is also here (and quite interesting). It has some auto-advertising (the author is of course in the game PR sector), but nothing annoying or excessive.
While I'm not becoming a PR agent (at least in the near future ;) it was more like a casual reading that a serious one. I already knew some of the examples, but others may be of use for a game dev. studio.
Title: Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista
Author: Michael Howard & David LeBlanc
Initially I didn't liked Windows Vista. A resource hog, some incompatibilities... But I had to use it at work so I installed it and worked with it for two months. After that, I really like the security features it has, but I felt like missing more details about specific topics... So I decided to buy this book.
Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista comes as a, mostly C++ oriented (although contains some C# examples), "how to use all new features" book. Very well structured, with lots of code examples, best practices, direct to the topic, and one thing I liked a lot: very sincere. If something is working bad, the authors state it clearly (for example, the Windows Firewall API, which has bugs), and they even provide workarounds to avoid them.
Down to the content, the book covers a lot of topics: New safer C functions, banned APIs, new APIs, UAC, token manipulation, integrity levels, code signing, virtualization, buffer overrun defenses, IPv6, Secure Socket extensions, Windows Firewall (Vista version, of course), IE7 security mechanisms & defenses (very interesting), Windows services development best practices, protected mode API and DEP, and the new CNG (Cryptography API: Next Generation).
Even if you don't usually develop with C++ I highly recommend this book. With it you will learn a lot about all the new security features of Vista. You just need some basic knowledge of standard Windows security features and some C++/API programming.
Title: Organiza tus ideas utilizando mapas mentales
Author: Jean-Luc Deladrière, Frédéric Le Bihan, Pierre Mongin, Denis Rebaud
Mind Maps are a technique I found interesting when I first read about it, mainly because I tend to make incredible "packed" abstracts and indexes about things. When at the university, I compacted some books in 15 pages to study (and it worked ;)
So, when I read about drawing just the ideas, expanding them like tree branches, focusing on not writing redundant info but the topics, the facts, the critical info... I thought "this is perfect for me".
The book is enjoyable, easy to read, with lots of examples, sample mind maps, and per-chapter abstracts (of course presented as a mind-map).
I recommend it without any doubt, very very interesting.
I think I've catch the idea of how to make mind maps perfectly. Let's see if I can put it into practice at work :D
