Hmmm - well Masters of Doom is the only one that really springs to mind here. Are you allowed use other reference sources or does it have to be books? His .plan archive is a mini-goldmine: http://floodyberry.com/carmack/

Here's another I just remembered - Michael Abrash's Black Book (PDFs available for free, just Google) has some appendices detailing some of the technical issues encountered and resolved during Quake's development.

A book is merely a series of pages with text printed on them, all bound together. Just print off the pages, bind them together, slap a cover on it, and call it good. It's now a book. If your professor says that it must be a published book, just say that the printer published it and your publishers distribution network is to an audience of one. I'd do it just for fun to see how they refute my reasoning.

You know what? ... I should become a lawyer.

You should probably find a better subject to do a report on then.

There is not enough material on Carmack to write an interesting report. The point of these things is to reference as many sources as possible and then put together your own unique report on Carmack. You can't do that with the lack of information out there.

What is and isn't allowed as a valid published source of information is not what your assignment is. Just like when a professor dis-allows using or referencing Wikipedia. Your assignment isn't to go out and put together a case to prove him wrong. Your assignment is to put together a good body of work under the original guidelines he gave you. Anything else you do just shows that you can't follow simple instructions, and you can't excel at a simple task that many classes and generations before you have done.

I think if someone used a game instruction manual as a source for a report, they deserved to be openly mocked in front of their entire class, and then thrown out.