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What is your favourite or more useful, insightful, or just fun book on fractals you've read?

For me it is "Fractals" by Hans Lauwerier, with just over 200 pages it's a little book.

His connections between numbers systems and fractals was very instructional.
It's odd that he chose not to mention anything about complex numbers at all but for a few pages appendix at the end of the book.

I also like "Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws", by Manfred Schroeder, covers so many different ideas.


Do you have any favourite books or to recommend?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_of_Fractals  ^-^

Heinz-Otto Peitgen Hartmut Jürgens Dietmar Saupe
Chaos and Fractals
New Frontiers of Science
Second Edition
comment: one very readable page for every topic with a little bit of code. Among the best books; strangely it ends at page 900 with a Mandelbrot set.

I want from every book to be either a textbook or monumental... complete in terms of smooth, detailed steps, full background, applications and specialized for maybe some topic where it should aim for advanced math and application. Unfortunately its a bloody battlefield, many men have fallen. Tanks have occupied cities and now the climate change chaos. 


Programs!
Ultra Fractal help file, Fractint documentation, Xenodream, IFSTools

"chaos" from james gleick - a great introduction to deterministic chaos
"indra's pearls" - a funny and easy to read book about symetrie and kleinian groups


 O0 :evil1: O0

Also:

Heinz-Otto Peitgen Hartmut Jürgens Dietmar Saupe
Chaos and Fractals
New Frontiers of Science
Second Edition


If you fancy playing with "L-systems" then:

"The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" - full PDF here: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop (http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop)

If you want to do 3D fractals then for general 3D rendering information (not fractal math) I use:

Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice
Foley:van Dam:Feiner:Hughes
Second Edition

Though I think Thomas (lycium) will tell you that the methods in there are showing their age ;)

No particular order here, but out of the four dozen or so books I have on fractals, these are the top of the list:

"The Beauty of Fractals"

"The Fractal Geometry of Nature"

"Fractal Creations" (Second Edition)

"The Science of Fractal Images"

"Fractals Everywhere"

"Fractal Imaging"
 

Well I've not come across that many   books to be honest. I  did read something about Mandelbrot some years ago and got interested. I'm currently re reading Chaos  by James Gleick. Another great  book I have is Nature's Chaos by Gleick and Porter. (Eliot Porter was a pioneer of colour photography and he was fascinated by what he called random patterns,and reading his thoughts and seeing his photos opened my eyes. Now I look for and photograph these random patterns everywhere!)
I also had a large book on patterns and fractal quilts with several programs in Basic-must find it again!

Introducing frctals a graphic guide

Thanks for providing such good information on getting Favourite books on fractals. I am also looking for the Fesc books list as with complete descriptions. I found one site http://www.ranker.com/list/fesc-books-and-stories-and-written-works/reference as it provides great information about it.