Customer Reviews

Beginning Pre-Calculus for Game Developers

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DON'T LET THE BOOK'S TITLE MISLEAD YOU!

I checked this book out at my school's library to read over the summer. I have just taken my school's Algebra and Trigonometry course, where we dug deep into trig. This book covers LESS than what we learned in class, it doesn't even go near calculus. All of that I could ignore if it wasn't aimed at game developers.

From the back of the book: "You will conquer the basics of these essential math topics and will then learn how to specifically apply each skill to the field of game programming." The book doesn't do ANY of this. I read about 3 sentences that mentioned game developers. They never apply these math skills to developing a game, not even when they cover matrices. Not to mention it's not even written like a math book - which could be a good thing if you have trouble dissecting math books. There's really no reason at all to read this book. The included CD has a nifty graphing program (Visual Formula), but I'm almost positive you can download this for free online.

Like I said, stay away from this book. It's incredibly misleading and almost totally useless.

This book is not about game development, but that's okay. It is about math--foundational knowledge for a computer game developer. Beyond that, it has three glaring problems. The first is how chunky and segmented the book is written, supposedly to make it more easily digestible. I found myself skipping a lot that felt like very remedial math. The second is that it makes you look at a PDF that is included on the CD for the solutions to the sample exercises. The third (and most serious problem) is that it contains errors that have made me stop trusting its appendix for answers to the sample exercises. Moreover, the book directs the reader to a website for edits and corrections where no corrections exist. Save yourself some frustration by choosing a different book.

I've only read about a chapters worth of this book, but what I read was better written than any other book I've read on this topic. No book ever explained radians and SIN, COS, TAN, COT, SEC and COS as well as this book did. To many authors have a hard time taking all the know and presenting it in an easy to follow format complete noobies like me. This book stands out as one that can explain it very easily. Things that I've still not understood completely after browsing through multiple books this one cements in just a page or two!