[The Inform Designer's Manual] [By: Nelson, Graham] [March, 2006]

by Graham Nelson

Since its invention in 1993, Inform has been used to design hundreds of interactive novels and short stories in eight languages. This text includes a critical history of interactive writings and the university games of the 1970s. (Computer Books--Languages/Programming)

Genres: Nonfiction, Programming, Reference

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The 54% complete status indicates that I've completed the main portion of the book excepting the appendices, which I don't intend to read.) Reviewing a programming book manual is certainly not like reviewing non-fiction or fiction books, but in this case we have a programming language (and one of the most successful at that) intended to create 'interactive fiction'. As such it must not only outline the language but also go into specific features to create these works, and provide a survey of design considerations as well (including a brief history of the medium, doubly necessary since Inform compiles to the same Virtual Machine that was used to create Infocom's Zork and related works, the Z-Machine). It succeeds at all of this, but if you are interested in it at all, I'd recommend playing the author's excellent games "Curses" and/or "Jigsaw" first.

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the introduction modestly states:

In trying to be both a tutorial and reference work, this book aims itself in style halfway between the two extremes of manual, Tedium and Gnawfinger's Elements of Batch Processing in COBOL-66, third edition, and Mr Blobby's Blobby Book of Computer Fun. (This makes some sections both leaden and patronising.)

I have an earlier version of this book, which is how I came to read it in 1997. In addition to being an excellent manual for a beginning computer programmer (as I was, back then), this remains my definitive fun read of programming books.