101 Fractal Projects (Paperback)

Almost excellent. A second edition could easily push it to five stars.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

I came to this book already familiar with the basics, and it still had plenty to offer. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. If you have the prerequisites, this is an easy recommendation. I will be keeping it on my desk rather than the shelf.