-Unprecedented access behind "Half-Life" and "Half-Life 2" -A forward by Valve founder Gabe Newell -Hundreds of art, design, preproduction, and other art pieces crammed into the book -Over a dozen key members of Valve's staff interviewed -Officially approved by Valve -Behind City 17 and other locations -The development of the Source engine -A rogue's gallery of beasts, characters, and monstrosities -Key weapons development revelations -A tour of many of the game's locations, from inception to completion -Filled with art, screens, and anecdotes from the Valve team

    It's a book for designers who code, and coders who design, and it's a book for people who do neither. And with ActionScript 2.0, Macromedia has yet again upped the standard for creating immersive digital experiences. With Flash, the possibilities for artistic expression are limited only by your imagination." Inside you'll find everything from the simplest rotating square to a full multifunction graph plotter, all programmed in ActionScript 2.0. Ever noticed how the shape of a fern repeats itself again and again in each tiny frond? Almost as though someone took a basic piece of code and made a few iterations. And the results is something unexpectedly simple, but, inexplicably beautiful. In Flash Math Creativity, you'll explore the harmony of nature and math to produce some truly unique design experiments.

    Topics covered in the book include writing reusable code; writing multi-platform titles efficiently and using iterative techniques in programming.