Playing with Chaos – July Update

Since my last post, I’ve been focusing almost all of my free time on writing this book. Mostly because I’m having so much fun writing it. I’ve finished a whopping six chapters since I last posted here. So yeah, it’s going pretty well. Here’s the current table of contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: What is a Fractal
Chapter 3: Symmetry and Regularity
Chapter 4: Fractal Dimensions
Chapter 5: Order from Chaos
Chapter 6: Diffusion-Limited Aggregation
Chapter 7: The Mandelbrot Set
Chapter 8: The Julia Set and Fatou Dust
Chapter 9: Strange Attractors
Chapter 10: L-Systems
Chapter 11: Cellular Automata
Chapter 12: Fractals in the Real World

I’m through Chapter 8 and heading into Chapter 9 now. Chapters 4 – 8 are first drafts, while 1 – 4 have been worked over a bit and are pretty close to final. I’d like to think I could be done with the writing by the end of August. Then another week or two for personal review and editing. After that I’ll need to have some other people review it and I’m considering how to handle copy editing – whether to hire someone or consider other alternatives.

One stroke of personal brilliance was that the utility library that is used in each example contains a method to pop out a bitmap image of the canvas that can be saved to disk. Built-in screenshots! So all the images for the book are easily created while I’m writing the text and code. Sometimes some cropping is needed, but I’ve got a good flow going for that as well. At this point, I’m up to 155 images. It’s a pretty graphics-heavy for a Kindle book, but I’ve been checking every image on a real Kindle and they all look decent.

If you want to get a feel for what’s coming, I’ve set up a site for the book at http://playingwithchaos.net. It’s got every image in the book, plus a video of the presentation I did at Beyond Tellerand/Play! that sparked my thoughts about writing this book.