Free gifts and videos

13 September 2013

I've created a new free book chapter downloads section on this website to make it easy to find the downloads of free book chapters and other goodies that are scattered throughout the site. As well as including chapters from Raspberry Pi For Dummies, Web Design in Easy Steps, and my novel University of Death, it includes a free chapter from Microsoft Office for the Older and Wiser that wasn't previously uploaded here. As well as book chapters, I've added in other free gifts such as the free Raspberry Pi case, my Amstrad CPC games and the Castle Fictoria website design project. I'll add to this page as I make new free gifts and free chapters available on this site. I'll be interested to see how popular this page is on the site, and whether it makes more people aware of the free chapters and encourages them to download them. Thank you to everyone who's been sharing the link since I posted it on Twitter yesterday.

I've also created a new page for my videos. It includes a short film I wrote and two promo videos for Raspberry Pi For Dummies and iPad for the Older and Wiser that I wrote and presented. Over time, I hope to add more videos here. Authors are increasingly asked to give talks, so I thought it might be useful for me to have a showcase on this site which was easy to find. I also wanted to find a home for the short film on the site, which apart from University of Death is the only fiction I've released on here so far.

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Play my Scratch demos in my new Scratch Arcade

12 September 2013

Scratch Programming in Easy Steps is at the printers right now, rolling through the full colour press, ready for publication later this month.

In advance of its publication, I've set up an arcade to showcase some of my favourite game demos from the book. You can play the shoot-em-up Space Swarm, a modified (harder!) version of Super Dodgeball, Spiral Rider, Quiz Break, Hangman and several of the short programs in the final chapter. The bulk of the book is made up of examples that are explained in detail, but I added a chapter at the back that included seven short programs for readers to modify, as a starting point for other programs they could develop. The idea was to show what's possible with just a few well-chosen blocks of Scratch. The short demos include Keepy Uppy (a mash up of football and breakout), Photo Safari (a whack-a-mole style game) and Shop Cat (a variant of Dodgeball that involves crossing a road to get your shopping).

You can play all these demos in my Scratch 2.0 and Scratch 1.4 Examples Arcade.

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