All of “Mathematics”

All right, this is not exactly news, but I was going through our bookshelf the other day when I remembered how much I like this book. It's a reprint of Alexander Dewdney's 1980's era columns for Scientific American called Computer Recreations. It's a great introduction to programming, one that I've referred to often over the years I've been doing interactive design. Dewdney really shows how programming can be a creative exercise and well just plain fun.

Although some of the examples could be considered "dated" the mathematics are still interesting and charming writing never goes out of style. All the source code is written in BASIC so it's extremely approachable for even dabblers in computer recreation.

The Magic Machine isn't available new (the last printing was 1990) but you can still find it on Amazon