Books, part I and still waiting for graphics

Friday the first of several books I ordered arrived: 3D Game Engine Architecture. I didn’t have time yet to read it completely (it’s over 700 pages), but I had a quick glance at the engine that comes with it (it’s called Wild Magic) and of course the book itself, and I’m confident that it was worth the money. Really loads of interesting stuff in there, and it’s written in a clear manner. Just be aware this is not a book for people who don’t know C++ or maths well - a solid background in both areas is needed. I’ve been playing around with Python again during the last days, writing a small script. Python is really amazing, especially when it comes to tasks where you’re working on a not-clearly defined dataset. In this particular example, the input data was corrupted, and even worse, the tool which exported it expected the same corrupted data back (in case you wonder: It was a malformed CSV file). Writing a cleanup function took me only minutes (thanks to the excellent built-in string library), same goes for the easy-to-use yet very flexible CSV parser. It took me no more than 2 hours to complete the script, including bug fixing, and in C++ it would have surely taken me twice the time. The most amazing about it was when I finally went to my client to install the script. The data originally exported turned out to be so corrupt that the tool didn’t recognize it any more during import, so I had to extend the fixup function - a matter of minutes, mostly due to the ability to treat strings as lists and mystring [:len (mystring)-len (stringtobestripped)].rstrip (otherwhitespace) style commands - something that would be a several-line construct in C++. I really love the power of Python when it comes to string manipulation. Moreover, the code was structured quite well and easy to read (thanks to the syntax rules of Python), it was easy to extend, especially as it was written in a hurry and not meant to be extensible. My new rig is still without a graphics card. I heard some rumours that some companies in Germany start shipping 6800 GT cards, and that a store in Norway has already a warehouse full of my XFX 6800 GT, and though these are only rumours I still hope that the card will arive during the next two weeks. I’ve uploaded a photo of how the comp looks right now (note the empty PCI-Express slot :) ). Take a look here.