Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos

In many ways, people largely stopped writing interesting programming books about ten years ago, once so much software became available to do so many jobs without us needing to be aware of the painful yet interesting details. This is a long out-of-print book on fractals that merges math, programming, music, and art into one interesting volume. And the kicker is that it cost me a tiny fraction of books that I have from the last couple of years that deliver little insight and page after page of application screen shots.

The book's main topic is producing art and music through that class of fractals known as strange attractors. Thus this book isn't your typical book on fractals that goes into the usual well-known fractal patterns. At the end of the day, you should know enough to produce an unlimited variety of patterns that in turn produce both visual and musical art. There is sufficient math in this book to understand the subject, but there is nothing beyond algebra. Although the book has many programs in it, the author is not assuming that you are an expert programmer. Because this book is 16 years old, the programs are in the BASIC programming language. However, the author has thoughtfully provided equivalent programs in C in one of the appendices. He has still another appendix that gathers together all of the mathematical equations discussed in the book. The book has numerous programming exercises, and so the appendix also has all of the programs that should result if you have done your work correctly. I'd recommend this book to anybody interested in computer generated art and music.