CRAZ8

I recently read Play Money, a book about how Julian Dibbell spent a year trading virtual goods in Ultima Online with real money. This is an interesting read for anyone building any sort of online system that has virtual goods of any kind. Even if you don’t want people to trade items in your world, people will find a way to do it, and some may make money from the process, and others will be ripped off (and blame you for it too!)

The cool thing is that if you have any success at all, there will be a demand for this type of trading that you can take advantage of – you just need to plan it out to make it transparent to users and not allow holes that cheaters can take advantage of.

I have the first version of this book, and have just used parts of this, the second version, to help setup a new MySQL server in a production environment.

This book has saved me hours already. Worth the price, right there.

If you do stuff with MySQL, you must have this book.

I recently read jPod the book by Douglas Coupland. Its a pretty good book, kind of weird – perhaps Quirky is a good description.

As a programmer in the video game industry, its kind of required reading

It turns our that CBC in Canada turned this into a TV Show)

This story works much better as a TV show!

Many would say yes, but Tom Standage would beg to differ in his book The Victorian Internet

Mr Standage tells the story of the people who created the telegraph system starting at the end of the 18th century, and leading to Samuel Morse and the first electric system in the US.  He goes into the social aspects of suddenly being able to be in touch across the world, the doom and gloom that came from the newspaper industry, and the rise and fall of the operators of the equipment.

I found out about this book from Rick Segal’s blog The Post Money Value

I got my copy from the library, but Amazon seems to have a recent reprint available