Version 0.7.11 - It's about time

Hey everyone, it has been a long minute, hasn't it?

After 4 revisions for version 0.7.10, I think the project has changed enough to warrant a new (minor) version, so here's version 0.7.11!

About time.

First of all, some thanks.

First of all, I want to thank you all for downloading this work over 20 thousand times! That's double the downloads in only one year, and about 40x what I expected in the 5 year horizon.

Also this project has been (kinda) featured on Hacker News for the third time in 2 years, thanks to everyone who keeps spreading the word!

Special thanks to LuosRestil (over at GitHub) for simplifying the overloaded pool calculation, and more thanks to Doublestuf (on GitHub) for giving the over 130 listings the once-over and fixing a lot of mistakes, as well as doing the majority of the work on a feature I have been wanting to bring for a long time.

Python Type Hints!

Here's the feature I wanted to bring in for a long time: PEP 484 for all the Python listings - that means "Type Hints"!

Now the entire Python edition has type hints written all around, to make it easier to understand what functions take as argument as well as what they are supposed to return. Hopefully this change is useful to everyone.

What's new

This section will include some things that have been added in the 4 revisions of 0.7.10 as well as the newest 0.7.11.

• In the spur of "The Crew"'s mess, courtesy of Ubisoft, I wrote an entire section about the retirement of a game in a way that can be considered more "ethical" and "consumer-friendly";
• New listings for all languages: Collision reaction for moving objects;
• Added a small "do not print" mark, as well as a small paragraph in the front matter expressing that printing this book is not a good idea, since its structure and content are meant to change and evolve with time;
• Added some new tools and engines;
• Python Type Hints (as said above);
• New section in "Computer Science": Equality vs. Identity;
• New section in "Computer Science": Truthiness and "Falsiness";
  
• New section in "Computer Science": Operators are functions too, with accompanying listings;
  
• Removed some redundant listings, these listings felt a bit like padding the book, which is already getting unwieldly, so long it is;
• New project to try, with some ideas: Conway's Game of Life;
• Lots of code and grammar fixes.

Saying farewell to Twitter/X

After the latest fiasco with Twitter and its AI model (Grok), I decided (finally) to give up and close my Twitter account.

Thanks to everyone who shared my book on the platform, it has been a long 12 years, but Twitter has morphed into a platform I just can't bring myself to use anymore.

Future plans

As you probably noticed, the project's development has slowed down considerably. Life, again, has gotten in the way and I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

My current plans are expanding the ebook's reach in breadth more than in depth: that means adding more editions focused on certain engines. Sadly I really cannot undertake more workload on this project without compromising its quality: I would end up throwing together another edition or two at most just to end up abandoning them down the line.

It would be great to have editions for the following engines/libraries:

• SFML (C++);
• SDL (C/C++);
• Löve (Lua);
• Bevy (Rust);
• Odin and its builtin libraries (they sound interesting;
• PyGame (Python), but this is currently low priority, I don't want to steal readers from Pygame 4000 which helps funding the PyGame project. If it turns out that the two books go in different directions, then it would be a nice thing to have.

The repository structure already allows for multiple editions per language (courtesy of "feature creep"), so it shouldn't be too hard to spin up more versions.

So if you're well-versed in one of those languages or engine and you want to contribute to an open-source project, feel free to hit me up on Mastodon or in the mini-forum that is offered by Itch!

About illicit sellers

Sadly it has happened again: someone has been trying to sell this work for money.

I don't mind if a website plucks the ebook and puts a download link for free, but it sickens me that someone is trying to make a quick buck out of mine and other peoples' goodwill.

The price? About 39$, discounted from 85.44$.

Sadly the Copyright claim procedure is absoltely nuts, requiring me to send a copy of my identity card to a foreign nation when there is clear proof of the nature of the book. There is an entire stream of posts from May 26th in my Mastodon Profile: Here's the link to my rant

Conclusions

The only thing I can say is thanks to everyone for following, reading and continuing to stand these long-winded update posts.

Take care of yourselves and stay safe.

Penaz.