Renderosity features a *long* article about Blender books.
Tony Mullen wrote:
Hi everybody,
My editor at Sybex just passed this link along to me and I thought people might be interested to see it. It's pretty nice to see this kind of publicity for the books and for Blender!
Link
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
7 Comments
Nice article, it's actually a compilation of three book reviews for blender books. He covers Blender for Dummies, Mastering Blender and Animating with Blender. Kind of swung it for me to get Mastering Blender now. :D
I didn't see Roger Wick's new book on compositing listed, which is one of my favorites.
Honestly haven't looked into Roger Wick's book, but I loved all the Lynda videos, they were great! This is still a nice list of books though for a beginner to stumble upon. Thanks Bart!
I can say that the briefly mentioned book by Tony Mullen, "Bounce, Tumble and Splash" was an excellent purchase for me a while ago and should stay useful even when 2.5 is realeased, and I'm going to have to get "Mastering Blender" for my library.
The reviews seemed to me unbiased, pointing out both the good points and the shortcomings of each book. Excellent link, Bart.
I'm also strongly considering getting the book on animation after reading this review. It's not something I've played with much yet, but my Blender knowledge has reached a point where all my usage could benefit from workflow optimisations and the planning/organisational hints that this book apparently covers well.
"The Essential Blender" (Roland Hess) has been a huge asset to me. Ever since I read it, I've felt that anyone who hopes to use Blender should read this book. Only now that 2.6x is on the way... it might be more confusing than it is helpful.
I also learned a lot from "[digital] Lighting & Rendering" (Jeremy Birn). It's not software-specific, so while the exact terminology may be different from what we've come to expect, it shouldn't have the problem of being tied to a specific Blender version.
Thanks for the positive comments on the reviews. I originally wanted to include the Essential Blender and Tony's excellent, "Bounce, Tumble...", but the already too long article would have been waaaaay to long, so I focused on these three. I"m very pleased that major publishers like focal press and sybex are creating a Blender track in their publishing list.
I hope to cover more Blender related books and news for Renderosity.com in the future.
-Ricky
All I want for Christmas... is a few good Blender books!