Not a question, just thought I'd throw out that I worked through Black Art of Java Game Programming when I was learning Java in 1997 or so. I still have my copy because I don't like getting rid of books. I found it really helpful for learning patterns for building medium sized software projects. I hadn't realized that you wrote that until years later when you mentioned something about it in The Startup Way.
No way! I would absolutely love to hear what you thought of that book. In fact, you may be the first person I've ever interacted with who actually read it!
I was in middle school at the time, learning programming. I think by that time, we had home Internet, but it was really slow, and so a lot of my learning about programming was either from the help files that came with the IDE (at the time for me learning Java, that meant Microsoft Visual J++) from books I convinced my dad to get me from Barnes and Noble as a reward for doing the "important" summer reading. I had a couple Java books before, but they were more focused on the mechanics of the language. Your book was the first that talked about how to put together a system.
As a specific example, I had never been exposed to much in the way of networking concepts before. Black Art has a chapter in adding networking functionality to a game which was my introduction to networking concepts and how to build networking software. Until much later when I learned about higher-level frameworks, I used the design patterns for network programming in several projects in school over the next several years.
