Customer Reviews

Beginning Game Programming: A GameDev.net Collection (Course Technology Cengage Learning)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I must mention the fact that I am a contributing author to this book. Hopefully however this will not cloud my review.

Having said that, this book is interesting. Are you going to go out and make the next AAA hit after reading this book? No. You're not even going to be coached from beginning to end on making a single cohesive game through the book unlike many others. This is not a hand-holding book, but a loose guide that hits on the important topics that will set you on your way to developing your own games. Topics range from the ever debated "What language should I use?", several graphics techniques, an introduction on common artificial intelligence methods and many more.

All articles in the books have been updated to reflect technological changes in the years since they were originally written (my original article was written in 2003 for example, so there have been marked changes in that time) and in some cases there are articles that aren't even available on the site. Updated content is only one draw. I, like many other people, prefer hard copy to staring at a screen all day. It's nice to have a bound copy to reference, but this is purely individual taste.

Could you get by with the information on the site to achieve the same goals? Sure. For the most part all of the information is on the site along with the priceless resource that is the [...] (which I highly recommend even if you don't happen to order any of the books). The collection of articles in this series however were handpicked for relevance in the topics and I think it's a great starting point for novices and a good reference for advanced users. Happy reading and good luck in your game development ventures.

This book tells us about some aspects of game programming and gives some tips for good programming. However for some subjects such as Networking, Sockets, Scripting you need to know C / C + +. I recommend this book if you have knowledge of algorithms, networks and at least some programming language, I remind you that this book are articles compiled from Game Dev, if you're a complete beginner and know nothing about programming you will need other books.

The good thing for beginners:

- It gives us good recommendations for a good understandable code (Singlenton, Standards).

- It teaches us to document our code.

- It teaches vectors and matrices to beginner level.

- Articles of exclusive Pathfinding for beginners.

- Articles about pointers and memory.

- Article about the collision Detection.

Too bad for beginners:

- You have to know c / c + + to understand some topics (tcp, Sock, Isometric Height Maps)

Beginning Game Programming: A [...] Collection, is the second in a series of books published in collaboration with [...], the online gamer networking community, and offers the best introductory programming articles that have appeared there over the past decade. Any library catering to beginning game programmers must have this: it's packed with details on everything from coding best practices and graphics to debugging and scripting.

The Bad:

- Very un-organized, a compilation of multiple online tutorials stuffed together in no particular order.

- There is a lack of code. Everything is very conceptual. explaining how things should be done with no actual examples.

-Operating System Specific. Almost all of the tutorials revolve around M$ Windoze.

The Good:

-Contrary to the other reviews i found the networking IP/TCP tutorials to be somewhat informative. However, this

seems like it was a rip off of Beej's socket tutorials.

-The majority of this book revolves around taking code that you already have, and optimizing it to the max.

-Creates a decent flow of how the gamming engine is supposed to be laid out. Unfortunatly that is as far as it goes.

This book is average at best. Buy something more API specific such as an intro to SDL or an OpenGL primer if you are just entering the field. Most of the material covered in this book can be found in greater detail with the help of "the google".