Guest Review – Adventures in Minecraft by David Whale and Martin O’Hanlon (4/5 stars)

Reading Level: Children’s and Up
Genre: Non-fiction/Programming
Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Release Date: November 17, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1118946916
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: ARC through Amazon Vine
Rating: 4/5 stars

This review was written by my husband as a guest review. Him and my son read and reviewed this book together.

I got a copy of this book to review through the Amazon Vine program. Overall this was a good book. My computer is running ubuntu 14, and since linux wasn’t expressly covered in this book, I was a little worried it might not work out well. In the end I only had to do a few extra things, like install the tk-dev package for python which wasn’t included by default with apt get (sudo apt-get install tk-dev), of course I had already made python, so I had to make it again, which was a little annoying.

Other than the above, I was able to follow the instructions in the book, and it worked out (btw, idle should be in your path after the python install, so you don’t double click on it in linux). The authors have a kit setup for download for the server (bukkit), which I would have liked the instructions for setup.

After the initial install, it was pretty easy to follow the instructions. This book is setup for someone who has no programming knowledge. I do java development for a living, so most of the book was just basics that I really didn’t need to read. I did think that for the most part the explanations were pretty good, but like most technical books, it was a little too wordy for my taste.

I was running through this with my 8 yr old son (who is a diehard Minecraft fan) and he understood pretty quickly what was going on, though some explanations were needed. My son quickly wanted to get off track from what the book was doing, and though that is kind of fun, it made it so that once he had the basics he really wasn’t interested in running through the other examples in the book. Right away he wanted to start doing other things.

My eight year old also lost interest in the programming part pretty quickly and wanted to stop putting in the code himself and have me do it. He was interested in the results and the coding held his interest for 30 minutes or so. So I would recommend for kids that are a bit older, probably 10 years or older…of course it depends on the kid.

The only other thing, is that one of the examples uses a raspberry pi board, to connect to minecrafter, we didn’t do that since we didn’t have one lying around, so we skipped that chapter. It looked interesting, but I didn’t really see the point.

Pros:
Well written with good basic examples
Setup was pretty easy

Cons:
A little long winded at parts
No instructions for setup of the server (this is in a README file, but it would be nice to at least have it in appendix of the book itself).