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Packt’s $5 eBook Bonanza is back!
This includes the entire range of popular Minecraft Titles I recently reviewed such as:
Building Minecraft Server Modifications, Minecraft Design – How to, and more.
Following on from the success of last year’s festive offer, Packt will be celebrating the holiday season with an even bigger $5 Bonanza. From December 19th, customers will be able to get any eBook or Video from Packt for just $5. This sale covers every title in the 1700+ range and customers can grab as many as they like until January 3rd 2014 – more information is available at http://bit.ly/1jdCr2W
Building Minecraft Server Modifications
Posted: November 2, 2013 in Minecraft Fun, Mining With iRun, Reviews
WIN A FREE COPY … SEE BELOW!!!
Ever wanted to learn the ins and outs of creating and managing a Minecraft multiplayer server? I remember the first time I decided I wanted to have my own server, well if it was a vanilla Minecraft server then no problem, but if you wanted to protect your Minecraft World from griefer’s or potential accidents learning how to implement and maintain a server could be a daunting task.
Building Minecraft Server Modification walks you through setting up a Craftbukkit server and the essential plugins. Then it takes you further into explaining how you too can build custom plugins to work with Minecraft. I am only currently half way through the book, but am totally delighted. I have read and reviewed other books thinking I just wasted so much time and it didn’t even deliver what the title promised. I am very pleased with this book so far. If you are excited and want to learn about Minecraft multiplayer servers I recommend this title.
What You’ll Learn:
Chapter 1: Deploying a CraftBukkit Server (Installation, Setup, Minecraft/Bukkit Server Commands)
Chapter 2: Learning the Bukkit API
Chapter 3: Creating Your First Bukkit Plugin
Chapter 4: Testing on the CraftBukkit Server
Chapter 5: Plugin Commands
Chapter 6: Player Permissions
Chapter 7: The Bukkit Event System
Chapter 8: Making Your Plugin Configurable
Chapter 9: Saving Your Data
Chapter 10: The Bukkit Scheduler
Want to learn more, see book here.
Would you like to win a free copy? Leave a response below or on my YouTube channel and you will be entered into a drawing to win a free copy.
I don’t know about you, but since witch huts and witches came out last Halloween I have never found a witch actually spawn in a witch hut in-game, in Minecraft until this past weekend. So just for proof that they do exist and to remind me in the future since I may or may not run into one again (they seem extremely rare) I am posting these in-game pictures.
Instant Minecraft: Pi Edition Coding How-to (Some assembly required)
Posted: August 6, 2013 in Reviews
Instant Minecraft: Pi Edition Coding How-to
I am all about “All Things Minecraft” so when I was asked to review Packt Publishing newest Minecraft eBook “Instant Minecraft: PI Edition Coding How To” I was very excited to say the least.
Like the title says “Some assembly required”, in order to take full advantage of this book one must have a Raspberry PI. What is a Raspberry PI? Glad you asked! According to the Raspberry Pi website (http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs) The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming. So in the spirit of full disclosure, while I was tempted to purchase a Raspberry PI (which can be purchased for under $100) while walking through the tutorials in the eBook, I refrained and merely settled for reading the book.
The book is a novel idea and for those wishing to delve it to coding in Minecraft it provides a unique opportunity. The book covers setting up Minecraft on a Raspberry PI device as well as coding in Python. Along the way it shows you how to create a reversi game to play inside Minecraft and for those truly adventurous souls how to use the Raspberry PI and a few other components to create a secret door and burglar alarm for Minecraft.
The concepts seem good and straight forward, but without having a Raspberry PI to test on I can only assume that the book is correct. Although I was able to get the book for review it would have been nice to know ahead of time that a Raspberry PI computer was needed to fully utilize the examples in the book. Of course, had I been more versed in the Raspberry PI prior to this book I would have automatically assumed so just be the title.
My recommendation if you are interested in coding in Minecraft and love tinkering with electronic devices then this book is a must have. If you don’t currently have a Raspberry PI, they are relatively inexpensive so the $$$ to purchase one should not be a hindrance.
I continue to enjoy the books the Packt Publishing is producing for Minecraft enthusiast and look forward to the next edition of Instant Minecraft.
For now, all my best!
iRun365
Minecraft 1.6 is out. Here’s the instructions for getting and using the new launcher.
Do you play on a multiplayer server? Have you ever updated Minecraft only to find out your favorite Bukkit server was updated yet or that the update was incompatible with the older version of Minecraft? Well with the New Minecraft Launcher (still in development) worry no more.
The other day I went ahead and update Minecraft to the new 1.5.2 release thinking that the updates were minor bug fixes. Boy was I surprised, once again, when I could not connect to some of my favorite multiplayer servers. Now before you chastise me for not backing up Minecraft first, there is now new hope on the horizon and it’s Minecraft’s New Launcher.
Download your flavor of the new Minecraft Launcher and worry no more.
Windows: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/MinecraftDev.exe
Mac/OSX: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/MinecraftDev.dmg
Linux/Other: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/MinecraftDev.jar
You need to start the launcher and login as usual. Before you click play though make sure you select the snapshot or release you want to play and the launcher will do the rest. By using the new launcher I was able to play on the servers that had upgraded to 1.5.2 as well as the ones that were still on 1.5.1.
See my video here on YouTube for a brief 3 min overview and happy Mining!!!
As previously mentioned, I was asked and volunteered to review an eBook from Packt Publishing titled, “Instant Minecraft Designs How To” by Mephisto Waltz.
This was day 2 and I want to start off by sharing something I learned years ago when working with computers. If you find yourself confused or getting frustrated it is often better to just step away from a day or two so your mind can clear and comeback later. Following that advice I had much better success on Day 2.
Beginning where I left off I was able to finishing the Tudor Style structure and just below are a few images of the finished work.
The book was created to teach someone how to use VoxelSniper and WorldEdit. I can tell you WorldEdit seemed to be the most useful in my opinion. VoxelSniper, at least for the first couple of designs, seemed to have little value and quite honestly was a pain to get installed and working correctly due to the recent upgrades from Minecraft 1.4.7 to 1.5.1
The book was originally written with 1.4.7 as the example and as with any software that is constantly evolving (which is a good thing for all of us) there can be problems when new versions come out and either the plugin upgrades are not available yet or in this particular case there was three different instructions and possibilities to install VoxelSniper on the server, but only one actually worked (see my other blog here on the right way to do it).
But I digress. So coming from a total noob to the admin, craftbukkit, and plugins world I will say that after I got everything sorted out I was able to get the structure built with a lot less frustration. The word “Instant” in the title could be a bit deceiving, because honestly I didn’t find anything very instant, but this was just a starting place to learn how to use plugins such as WorldEdit to assist people in making builds.
On my first try while learning how to use the plugins, I found that I could have built the structures in creative almost as fast as trying to learn how to do it using WorldEdit, however once I went through the steps a few times I realized how valuable WorldEdit could be especially if you are creating a multiplayer server and you want to create a spawnpoint city.
On a rating system I would probably give the book a 4 out of 5 stars mainly because the timing of the book being published after Minecraft 1.4.7 had been replaced by 1.5.1. Also, I wished and thought based on the title that there would be more great designs to follow along with in the book, but again, I have only finsihed 1-1/2 projects (there are 4 projects total in the book).
The last two projects which include building a Pagoda and a Futuristic City both look awesome and are quite complex. If you want a great spawnpoint for a new multiplayer server world then the Futuristic City design might do nicely.
There is still a lot to explore in the book and trust me it does take time especially for someone who has never used these tools before, but if you want to learn how to build these designs and use WorldEdit and VoxelSniper to speed up the process then this book will be right for you. For my money though I would purchase the less expensive eBook or PDF rather than the more expensive print book.
Now I will just leave you with a quick video of my final creation.
Minecraft Times 