Recommended Reading: ``Masters of Doom'' by David Kushner

The book being recommended is ``Masters of Doom'' by David Kushner (ISBN 0-8129-7215-5).
Information concerning it may be found here:
http://www.davidkushner.com/book/masters-of-doom

This recommendation is similar to my 2019-03-15 recommendation in that it recommends a biography and
is a rather light read one could easily finish in a short time, although I'm inclined to believe the
book being recommended here is generally a longer read than the other.

The book details John Carmack, John Romero, et al., along with the experiences, games, and companies
involved.  The book starts by detailing John Romero's early life and strict upbringing and Carmack's
differently strict upbringing and unusual intelligence; both found themselves attracted to computing
at a young age, with Romero biking to a college to play games as a child, and Carmack wanting for an
Apple ][ so much he tried to steal one from a school with thermite, but was caught; both found their
way to Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana to program games.

As is obvious, id Software was eventually created.  Starting with platformers such as Commander Keen
and later writing FPSes, with Wolfenstein-3D followed by DOOM and later Quake and its sequels; also,
selling the engines to other game companies for their own creations.  As is also obvious, this group
would slowly corrode and the team would split to go to new ventures and pursuits.

This is obviously a very brief summary of the book.  I found Carmack to be the much more interesting
of the pair and enjoyed reading of, as an example, his use of the Finger protocol as a means to show
others his daily work.   The book contains a great many technical details concerning Carmack's work,
but also contains a great deal of the interpersonal interaction and drama that pervaded the work and
also covers topics such as the Columbine Massacre, hacker culture, and of course the rise that would
allow such a fall.

If you're fond of any id software games, fond of games from the period in general, or are interested
by the technical details and environment of such programming, the sixteen chapters in this book will
likely be a good read and so I can recommend it.