Hacker News Books

_Animator's Survival Kit_, by Richard Williams.

_Illusion of Life_, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

_Animation from Script to Screen_, by Shamus Culhane.

_Natural Way to Draw_, by Kimon Nicolaïdes.

_Creative Illustration_, by Andrew Loomis.

_Timing for Animation_, by Harold Whitaker and John Halas.

_Drawn to Life_, vols. 1 & 2, by Walt Stanchfield.

_Character Animation Crash Course!_, by Eric Goldberg.

_Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation, by Wayne Gilbert.

_The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design_, by Tod Polson.

_Elemental Magic: The Art of Effects Animation_, vols. 1 & 2, by Joseph Gilland.

_Story Boarding Essentials_, byDavid Harland Rousseau.

_Directing the Story_, by Francis Glebas.

_Animated Storytelling_, by Liz Blazer.

Upvoted. As an fan of animation this is indeed an excellent book.

Another one I particularly enjoyed is "The Illusion of Life" - particularly the early chapters in which the authors describe describe Walt Disney Studios during their startup days.

Fascinating stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Willia...

Most of the points from the article seem to be derived from the stuff the book covers in more details.

"Milt, do you ever listen to classical music when you're working?"

Kahl is illustrated as turning back from his work, towering over Williams and bellowing

"Of all the s-s-s-stupid god-god-god-damned questions I-I-I-I've ever heard! I-I-I-I-NEVER heard such a-a-a-f-f-f-f-stupid question! Iy-Iy-Iy-Iy-I'm not smart enough to think of more than one thing at a time!"

The author is then pictured with "Animation is concentration" written across the back of his shirt.

I tend to agree with this sentiment when it comes to programming. If you can't have quiet, find a place where you can to start new projects. Music is to be enjoyed, and I enjoy music most when it's the thing I focus most on. I can listen to music when cleaning, but not when programming (or cooking).

Here is an example task I completed yesterday:

    #1982: Automatically update events widget

    SG Shortcode
    
    Instructions coming. Depends upon APC being enabled for caching to
    work properly. Triggered through the use of `[events]` shortcode

How I write something was largely irrelevant in the beginning, so long as it completed the task. In this instance, there was a bit of back and forth in the github issue concerning the implementation, but for smaller things there usually isn't any back and forth. The scope of the task and the depth of it's affects should drive the workflow around your development, not a commit message you through together on the off-chance that the task is still relevant at the end of the day.

If you have a large enough task that you are using commit messages to plan out how a feature will work, you're gonna have a bad time. You might want to start chunking your work into smaller, more manageable, testable components, otherwise whatever the hell you ended up writing is going to be full of failboat.