Reddit reviews The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985 - 1993

I can't tell you. I can tell you the best book on game development I've ever read is Masters of Doom. I highly recommend that one.

I can also recommend Jordan Mechner's Journals from the development of Prince of Persia.

I highly recommend Masters of Doom, it covers the story of John Carmack and John Romero from their pre-id years up until around 2002 or so and goes over the development of early id games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake as well as other companies at the time like Apogee/3D Realms and Softdisk and of course Ion Storm, Daikatana and the issues with its development.

If you find that interesting i also recommend Jordan Mechner's Making of Karateka and Making of Prince of Persia. These are unique in that they are the journal that Jordan Mechner kept while making these games (start with the Karateka one, the PoP one continues more or less where the Karateka one ends) back in the 80s and early 90s up until he started working on The Last Express and give a unique look not only at how development was done at the time, but also how a very known at the time publisher - Brøderbund - was running during their later years (which sadly ended up collapsing in the midlate 90s just when The Last Express was released, which ended up with TLE becoming a commercial failure despite the critical praise it had, in large part because the marketing team left the company weeks before the game's release and nobody was around to market it :-P). Also there are several bits about Mechner's attempts on movie writing since that is another passion of his, although that wasn't as successful (he did write the Prince of Persia movie though and was a moderate success).

Another interesting book is Hackers. This is an older book, written in early 80s about the "computer hackers" that influenced modern computing. A large part of the book is about the earlier communities, like those at MIT from where the free software and open source movement began, but there is also a sizeable part about the early days of gaming companies that would later become powerhouses like Sierra and - again - Brøderbund. This last one is very interesting because you can see the shift from the early Brøderbund days in Hackers towards the more boureaucratic and sterile environment in their later days as shown in Mechner's journals. This also makes me curious about their last days and i'd like to see Mechner writing about the development of The Last Express if for no other reason than that.

Finally a book that i also liked a lot, although this one focuses more on a single genre and the games that make it up, is Dungeons and Desktops which focuses on the development of CRPGs from the early attempts at mainframes down to modern RPG games.

Computer and computer gaming history are favorite topics of mine and i tend to buy books about them (and i really like finding common pieces in different books).

Not exactly theory of game design, more like history of game making but really good ;)

• The making of Prince of Persia by Jason Mechner
  
  
• Masters of Doom by David Kushner

The Making of Prince of Persia, though I guess it's more like a journal of Jordan Mechner as he was working on the game.