The great success of BfW is that it attracted so many talented people to create graphics and, to a lesser extent, sound and UX. It's a weakness of this piece that it doesn't focus on the bigger picture of why the project was so successful.
Brown & Wilson have done the free software community a service with their book, but I do think they should have worked more with some of the authors to get better material from them.
In fact, the author stated that a lot of architectural decisions are made in orded to make a game more approachable to new coders and designers, including the choice of WML, usage of "standard" libraries (WML) and as much separation between modules as possible.
One of the complaints about "Beautiful Code" was that chapters were all over the map. We therefore decided at the outset of this project to focus on architecture, not on the sociodynamics of open source projects. If you'd like to organize a book on the latter, I'd be happy to help you round up contributors.
- Greg Wilson
Brown & Wilson have done the free software community a service with their book, but I do think they should have worked more with some of the authors to get better material from them.