The book on procedural generation arrived.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1558 ... 01_s00_i00
I will try to use the techniques in a future game, although I do not think it will be a space sim.
There are plenty example pictures and really a lot of nice useful and short or not too long algorithms to get the head around. The book looks nicely formatted and the code and non-code parts well presented.
The maths is hairy at times of course due to the nature of the subject, but I guess it's not essential to fully understand the maths to use the algorithms.
Many of the algorithms are written in Shaderman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RenderMan_Shading_Language
That language is C like and can be used in open source languages Pixie or Aqsis according to the wiki.
The link on the back of the book to get the algorithms code put me to a dead link. However the algorithms look to be short enough to easily type in and you would want to convert them to your own framework anyway. They are high level (No open GL C++ stuff that I could see on first glancing through the pages) as they sit on top of Renderman, but high level is good to understand the algorithms in my opinion.
There is stuff on so much in this book from wind to clouds to planet creation and far too much for me to list. It really has lot of useful algorithms. It's 687 pages and a lot to read. Hard back and quite heavy, use with strong hands or a book rest
Oh and to jump to the previous discussion, C# is a rather nice language and easy to pick up if you know Java. C# is important in business circles and windows and windows phone and XBOX etc... For game dev, C++ could have an edge for portability although there are cross platform frameworks that use C# like Mono where you can write your code once in C# and port to most of the main platforms.
Depending on the game development you wish to do cross platform frameworks such as LIBGDX are good as they do the open GL stuff for you (although you can still go low level including programmable shaders etc) and have things to help with asset management. LIBGDX is a write your code once and compiles to HTML5, Desktop runnable jar, Android and also IOS very soon. Decent cross platform alternatives to LIBGDX are Cocos-2dx which I think uses C++ and also Playn by Google. Pratically to do anything for IOS you need a MAC which is a financial pain, but hey ho, and you can get away with using a Mac mini. The frameworks I mention are free without royalties, except for the IOS dev option you may also need to purchase Monotouch which is 399 dollars for an Indie license (Yes I know, ouch), it is either that or learn Objective-c.