Customer Reviews

Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games

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I teach a college course on network game programming and this is probably the best resource that I've yet seen on the subject. Only the last few chapters specifically deal with network programming however they are extremely good and cover a lot of the core issues with network gaming. Some of the topics include dealing with lag via dead reckoning and splines, local perception filters, area of interest filters, as well as some information on cheating and how to deal with it.

This book is absolutely NOT for someone just starting out with network programming or programming in general; I would recommend this for someone who knows the fundamentals of networking and using sockets and is a fairly strong C/C++ programmer and is interested in developing moderately simple network games. More inexperienced developers will probably benefit from this book if they have someone who can help clarify and explain the concepts.

I'm a lead developer at a small small software company which develops 3d game middleware and infrastructures.

Good library always improves an employee's knowledge and interest which boosts product quality. Therefore we bought this book because our companies library doesn't have a book about network programming for games.

However the instant this book arrived to the office we found out that this book is totally worthless. It's 250 pages long and it contains more than 8 major chapters (most of the chapters is not about network programming) that you can write 1000 paged book about each of them.

The book is mostly computer science AI topics (and very little networking) which has little practical value. Networking section is a joke. The book contains nothing but the topics everybody talk about (like you should optimize your network packages) but nobody tells you what is the proper way to do it. It does not contain any implementation details. It is not a programming book and it does not teach you how to code stuff.

It is neither intermediate/advanced book because it contains very little and introduction level material nor it is a beginner book because it has written like academic research paper.

Don't buy this book. It is aimless, badly-written, contains very brief information, has no practical usage and last but not least it is $70+ waste of money.

You can use Wikipedia instead of this this book because it contains all the information contained in this book. (At least wikipedia is written in plain language)