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Rating: 
Summary: innovative and original source of inspiration
Review: An excellent and original book with interesting subject matter. A great source of innovative approaches to experimental image making and design. I found all of the tutorials to be easy to follow and enlightening, especially Lias work with Director. Being able to go "behind the scenes" with one of the creators of Turux.org and see how some of those amazing Shockwave pieces were made is invaluable. The personal essays were all very inspirational and interesting to read as well. This book is highly recommended for those who want to take their artwork into interesting new directions. I hope Friends of Ed makes more art/essay/tutorial books like this in the future because the format is great!
Rating: 
Summary: Shovelware publishing from FOE
Review: I think this book is a great idea, so three stars. ... Here we have yet another collection of chapters by designers who haven't communicated with each other, and apparently don't have a strong editor with an overall vision, so the book doesn't develop an idea throughout. That's fine if you like the rockstar approach, but why not just look at these guys' websites instead?The problem with this is that there's just nothing new here. Everything here, and I mean everything, is available on the web, especially if you make contact with people and learn from work they've done. Still, it's nice to see a somewhat unusual topic get a whole book, and Golan Levin is a genius, full stop, so I'm glad he's getting noticed.
Rating:
Summary: just BRILLIANT!
Review: In one word : EXCELLENT! In a litlle more words : this book is a perfect realisation of a designer's dream. Each chapter, written by a different author, gives you all the insights and reflexions of the artist upon its work, and the way he/she uses inspiration, and , on the same time, they introduce you to a programming tool in a very clear way by giving a documented example of code.
Lia's introduction to Director/Lingo is amazingly direct, simple and clear and gives a very nice resulting piece of work.
Golan Levin's chapter in very inspirational, he somehow takes the intuitive approach of his former professor John Maeda from MIT, but goes further in explanations. He takes the step between idea and code, giving you a "double-scaled" example : a simpler code in DBN (Deisgn By Numbers), and a more complex and powerfull one in Java. The resulting piece is again brilliant, as is G. Levin.
I do think that there is a strong editorial approach in this book : it's to give each artist the space to express him/herself without the necessity of a global view. In fact, I think this is one of the best aspects : it shows you that there is no "global approach" to generative design. Instead, everyone is playing with their favorite tool, or constructing new tools in order to escape the uniformisation process of digital design.
It is true that some parts may be found on the web, but not everyone can be in direct contact with those artists, so I found their explanations of their own work very inspirational and i think it was a great idea to ask the artists to remix each other's works and to comment on them. (Btw, the reader is also invited to do so, and all code is availlable on the web). Conclusion : a BRILLIANT and ORIGINAL approach to digital design, and probably one of the most usefull book on this particular matter.
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