Mike O'Brien \ Blog

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Trogdor in Technicolor

Thursday, January 19, 2006 11:39:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

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Laboris Gloria Ludi

Puerto Rico (Andreas Seyfarth, Rio Grande, Alea) - The players are plantation owners in Puerto Rico in the days when ships had sails. Growing up to five different kind of crops: Corn, Indigo, Coffee, Sugar and Tobacco, they must try to run their business more efficiently than their close competitors; growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing San Juan with useful buildings, deploying their colonists to best effect, selling crops at the right time, and most importantly, shipping their goods back to Europe for maximum benefit.

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Tigris & Euphrates (Reiner Knizia, Mayfair Games) - Ranked as Reiner Knizia's best game, thusfar this is the highlight of his prolific career. The game is set in the ancient fertile crescent with players building civilizations through tile placement. Players are given four different leaders: farming, trading, religion, and government. The leaders are used to collect victory points in these same categories. However, your score at the end of the game is the number of points in your weakest category, which encourages players not to get overly specialized. Conflict arises when civilizations connect on the board, i.e., external conflicts, with only one leader of each type surviving such a conflict. Leaders can also be replaced within a civilization through internal conflicts.

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Agile Principles, Patterns, And Practices in C# (Robert C. Martin & Micah Martin) - Presents a series of case studies illustrating the fundamentals of Agile development and Agile design, and how it applies to programming in the .NET Framework. This book includes chapters that lay out the basics of the agile movement and show proven techniques. It also includes many source code examples.

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Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design (Alan Shalloway & James Trott) - This text draws together the principles of object-oriented programming with the power of design patterns to create an environment for robust and reliable software development. Packed with practical and applicable examples, this book teaches you to solve common programming problems with patterns--and explains the advantages of patterns for modern software design.

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QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Richard P. Feynman) - Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely quantum electrodynamics), that part of quantum field theory describing the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman clearly and humorously communicates both the substance and spirit of QED to the layperson. A. Zee's new introduction places both Feynman's book and his seminal contribution to QED in historical context and further highlights Feynman's uniquely appealing and illuminating style.

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The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (Steven Weinberg) - This commentary on the discovery of the atom's constituents provides an historical account of key events in the physics of the twentieth century that led to the discoveries of the electron, proton and neutron.

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Hydrogen: The Essential Element (John S. Rigden) - The allure of hydrogen, crucial to life and critical to scientific discovery, is at the center of this book, which tells a story that begins with the big bang and continues to unfold today. In this biography of hydrogen, John Rigden shows how this singular atom, the most abundant in the universe, has helped unify our understanding of the material world from the smallest scale, the elementary particles, to the largest, the universe itself.

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