3pointD.com

Well, it’s official. Actually, it’s the official guide to Second Life, out now (or rather, as of this Wednesday) from Wiley. I’ve paged through most of it already and it looks like a pretty good guide for finding your feet in the virtual world. Why do I have a copy already? The same reason it’s kind of hard for me to give it a terribly unbiased review: I wrote two chapters of the thing. So go buy it now! To be honest, though, I’ve already learned a couple of things about inventory management and stuff like that from it. The thing is, Second Life changes so quickly and so much, even the software behind the world, that it remains to be seen how useful the book will be over time. All part of a nefarious plan to sell multiple editions, I imagine. One thing valuable about grabbing this edition: There’s a lot of good history in there, and a record of current builds and communities that are archived on no other pages (except here and there around the Web). In any case, I recommend a purchase, not least because some very small portion of it will go to support 3pointD.