Customer Reviews

Creating Fractals (Graphics Series)

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I really expected better from Roger Stevens. In the past he has written some truly excellent books on computer graphics that included working code. This particular book is very elementary with only the bare bones of the mathematics of fractals being given. Most of the book just shows a picture of each type of fractal covered, a screenshot of the included application and what you should type into the application to get the resulting fractal, and some text without equations on each fractal. If you really want to learn the mathematics behind fractals you should read "Chaos and Fractals" by Peitgen, and the older "Science of Fractal Images" by the same author. Both books are accessible yet go into sufficient mathematic detail that you could write working code. The authors even offer up code examples of their own. The second book I mentioned on fractal imaging has some great code samples and mathematics for creating beautiful realistic natural scenes of forests and lakes that are completely computer generated. I notice Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here:
1. Introduction
2. What are Fractals?
3. The Lorenz and Other Strange Attractors
4. What you can do with L-System Fractals
5. The Snow Flake and other Von Koch Curves
6. Peano Curve
7. Generators with Different Sized Line Segments
8. The Hilbert Curve
9. FASS Curves
10. Trees
11. Creating your own L-System Fractals
12. Newton's Method
13. What you can do with Mandelbrot-Like and Julia-Like Fractals
14. The Mandelbrot and Julia Sets
15. Working With Colors
16. Fractals with the Logistic Equation
17. Fractals using Transcendental Functions
18. Fractals using Orthogonal Polynomials
19. Creating your own 2nd-order to 7th-order Equations
20. Phoenix Curves
21. The Mandela and Pokorny Fractals
22. Fractals Using Circles
23. Barnsley Fractals
24. Iterated Function Systems
25. Midpoint Displacement Fractals

I got this book to learn how to generate fractals and use the included programm to generate large images for printing. While the programm is very flexible in terms of what it generates, maximum resolution is something like 600x400. There are better books that bescribe what fractals are. This book will not help you to set up calculations on you own and it's fractal generation programm is useless for anything other that on screen display.

Fractals were originally considered to be a rather messy offshoot of conventional mathematics. They required entirely too much arithmetic to be useful before the age of computers. But with computers the whole concept of fractals became something that could indeed be studied.

A bit of time goes by and all of a sudden the people doing fractals begin to discover that using the right kind of mathematics can be used to produce a lot of images that begin to look like things in nature. These drawings began to look like things such as trees, mountains, clouds, explosions. And all of a sudden there was an interest beyond those of the mathematician just drawing cute geometric patterns, it's called game development.

This book is not on gaming, it's on the basics of fracticals. It includes software to generate fractals, and it gives the mathematics of how these fractals are created. It's a basic, beginners book to computer graphics at the mathematical level.

The software included inthis book is retro 20 century, lame.
Images are strictly low-res (600x400); interface pedantic: no retrace, wouldn't save bmp images on XP. wasted money!