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Minecraft modding is changing far too fast, by the time a book was written, edited, and published, it'd likely be largely obsolete, by my judgement. In fact just today the release of Minecraft 1.6 has pretty much obsoleted "jarmods" (direct replacement of classes in the minecraft.jar) by Mojang's new launcher, not to mention a brand new resource pack system obsoleting texture packs, as well as a large amount of internal refactoring. This pattern has repeated throughout Minecraft's release cycle. Though with Minecraft 1.0 it is no longer considered in "beta", each major version has brought incompatible changes. Mojang doesn't use semantic versioning, needless to say. Had a book been written around 1.2, it would have undoubtedly focused on the singleplayer/multiplayer split, and the steps needed for modders to develop SSP-only or SMP-compatible mods, but this distinction was blurred or eliminated in 1.3. 1.3 was mostly a dead zone for modding, only to come back in 1.4. With 1.4 we saw the introduction of new server implementations or administration mods, combining either analogous functionality or proper support for both leading modding frameworks, Forge and Bukkit (including MCPC+, BukkitForge, ForgeEssentials, etc.). Modding toolkits come and go: about a mere year ago, you might be modding with ModLoader, ModLoaderMP, AudioMod. Or pure Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP), with no APIs. Or lesser-known custom APIs. Nowadays, Forge ModLoader has basically taken over ModLoader, and many modders have been moving to Forge for compatibility and other reasons. IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, Mystcraft, Forestry.. all leaders in the Forge modding world. But there are still factions of modders sticking with Risugami ML, or even using raw jarmod edits like Better than Wolves. Not to mention - server-only "plugin" development using Bukkit is almost a completely separate community. You have the vanilla original CraftBukkit server implementation, then performance-focused forks like Spigot, or other forks with their own goals like SportBukkit, Libigot, or the mod-compatible MCPC+.. each with their own benefits. Fortunately most have similar plugin compatibility, but a few add new APIs, or otherwise change Minecraft behavior.. Bottom line, Minecraft modding is a hodgepodge of often-incompatible rapidly-changing frameworks, built on an unstable rapidly-changing foundation (which is obfuscated and has to be reverse-engineered each release, nonetheless). There have been advancements to streamline this problem, and it is getting better, but we're not out of the woods yet. Even tutorials you can find online for modding – such as on the Minecraft Forge wiki, are frequently outdated. A book would even be more so. Nonetheless, I think you're right, it would be very nice if someone could pull it off, putting out an informative yet updated book on Minecraft modding. Maybe things will settle down and stabilize after the infamous Mojang modding/plugin API is released. |