Focus On SDL (Focus on Game Development) [Paperback]

Ernest Pazera (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1592000304 | ISBN-13: 978-1592000302 | Publication Date: November 18, 2002 | Edition: 1

Focus On SDL is your key to writing programs faster and with greater ease. Execute the same applications as with DirectX, but with more versatility. SDL allows you to pack up your code and go! If you have a basic knowledge of C++, you're ready to roll. Dive into advanced topics such as alpha blending and overlays, or intensify your game audio with the SDL_mixer add-on library. This book teaches you how to write the code and then distribute it to various platforms. From setting up your system to incorporating networking and user interface components, Focus On SDL gives you the tools you need in one comprehensive guide.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ernest Pazera is a self-taught programmer, starting at age 13 with a TRS-80. Within a month Mr. Pazera was writing video games. By age 15, he realized that he could be happy with nothing less than being a game programmer. He is one of the developers who helped create one of the most popular and respected game development sites on the Web---www.gamedev.net. He is a moderator of an isometric/hexagonal forum on the site and has extensive experience with game development. Ernest is the author of Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0 from Premier Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (November 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592000304
• ISBN-13: 978-1592000302
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,115,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An overview of SDL..., December 21, 2005

By 

Andrew M. Matta (Notre Dame, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Focus On SDL (Focus on Game Development) (Paperback)

I am a sophmore in college studying computer engineering, and I bought this book in the hopes that it would help me with a programming project for school. The main thing that this book has going for it is the fact that it is actually writing about SDL... not many other books go into this subject and it is refreshing to see a book that doesn't limit itself to the Windows/DirectX world.

The book is written in easy to understand language and is very helpful in showing what SDL is capable of. It proceeds to show readers how to set up most of SDL's different subsystems.

The main problem with this book is that it does not go into detail about any of the topics it covers. If you're curious about how to use SDL's video/graphics capablity, for instance, you will learn how to initialize the system and draw some circles on the screen. The book has smaller pages than most, and the 54 pages long chapter on the video subsystem doesn't take long to get through. It leaves you wanting to know more.

In short, this book will skim over different topics in SDL and teach you enough to get started. You will need to look elsewhere for details. I recommend purchasing this book to get you on the right track, but just know that you will need to search the internet for tutorials and example applications before you can seriously write games. This book is only a beginning.

Since you are looking at a book on SDL, I assume you are trying either to learn how to program games/graphical applications for Linux, or are trying to make it so that the code you write can have multi-platform support. If this is the case, I would recommend looking at "Linux Game Programming" by Mark Collins (in the same series as this book) and "Programming Linux Games" by Loki Software/John Hall as well. Of these three books, I like "Programming Linux Games" best since it goes into greater detail and walks you through the creation of a basic, but complete game for Linux. Even though it has Linux in the title, most of the APIs it touches on (SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, etc.) are cross-platform, so what you learn is not limited to Linux alone. For the project I was working on, I found myself jumping amoung the aforementioned books and online tutorials such as those at NeHe.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good tutorial, April 28, 2003

By 

John Hattan (Southlake, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Focus On SDL (Focus on Game Development) (Paperback)

<i>Focus on SDL</i> is Ernest Pazera's fourth programming tutorial and the third one written for Premier Press. With every effort, both Mr. Pazera and Premier are getting closer to putting together an ideal set of game development tutorials. Pazera's books get more organized while Premier focuses and deflates the fat from their efforts. <i>Focus on SDL</i> is about all I could hope for from an SDL tutorial. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of doing what it
sets out to do.</p>

First off, let me say something about SDL -SDL is easy! While it's got a couple of quirks here and there, SDL is a very well organized and very easy to learn library for games. And <i>Focus on SDL</i> realizes this.
It doesn't try to make a simple subject complicated by ignoring the big picture to focus on minutiae. The main tutorial starts out logically with a discussion of starting up and shutting down SDL, followed by creating your main window, followed by placing bitmaps on the window, followed by event-handling, followed by playing CD-audio and video, followed by the joystick, and finally finished by threads and timers. In other words, it goes in about the order you'd need to go to write a simple game. Go figure.</p>

If you haven't figured out yet, this is a good book for beginners. It takes an easy-to-learn library and makes it even easier to learn. There aren't any code-listings for the obligatory breakout-clone in the text,
but by the time you get to page 150, you should have no problem figuring out how to structure a game from what you've read.</p>

The next 75-odd pages of <i>Focus on SDL</i> are focused on
the most important SDL add-on libraries. If you go to the SDL website, you'll see that there are literally dozens of add-on libraries available that cover everything from sprite graphics to GUI libraries. <i>Focus on SDL</i> covers the four libraries that I would have chosen as the most important components that are not part of core SDL, namely SDL_image (loading common bitmap file formats), SDL_ttf (loading and displaying TrueType fonts), SDL_net (networking), and SDL_mixer (loading, mixing, and playing sounds). As you can imagine, a complete game would likely need most, if not all, of these add-ons, so it's good to have those covered.</p>

The remainder of <i>Focus on SDL</i> covers a C++ wrapper-library for SDL. SDL lends itself very nicely for abstracting with objects, so constructing a wrapper that abstracts all of the primitive SDL bits like colors, palettes, rectangles, etc. is certainly a good idea.</p>

One thing I'd like to commend the author for is waiting to write the class-library until the end of the book. I've read so many books that spend all of chapter 2 constructing a comprehensive class library wrapping the subject technology, then using the rest of the book teaching you how to use the class-library rather than the technology itself. That means that if I want to
know how to use a particular call, I can't just look up the call in the book. I have to look at the author's wrapper-function and figure out how it works. If you want to know the particulars of SDL_Init(), you can just look it up in the
book and read about it. You don't need to take apart the author's own version of SDL_Init() to see it works.</p>

I mentioned earlier that the book's not perfect. My biggest
complaint is its lack of coverage of platforms other than Windows. One of the biggest advantages of SDL is that it works under pretty-much every major computer platform out there. While all of the examples should work just fine on other platforms, I would really liked to have seen coverage of getting SDL to work under Linux and Mac OSX. As it stands, the book only mentions other platforms in passing, pointing out that things like threading can be troublesome to do cross-platform, but never getting deeper than that.</p>

My other complaint is minor. A popular use of SDL nowadays is as a windowing front-end for OpenGL. While this is indeed too deep of a subject for a tutorial like this, it would have been good to see at least some pointers for more information on marrying SDL and OpenGL.</p>

Lack of cross-platform information notwithstanding, <i>Focus on SDL</i> is the best SDL tutorial that I've found. It's a perfect book for beginning game developers, as it makes an easy topic even easier. If you want to write a 2D game, check out SDL. If you want to check out SDL, get this book. I don't know how to make it any clearer.</p>

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good intro. to SDL if you already have C++ knowledge and a copy of VC++, March 6, 2007

By 

evil genius - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Focus On SDL (Focus on Game Development) (Paperback)

It's a pretty good introduction to SDL I think. A bit misleading though being part of the 'Game Development Series' but it doesn't teach how to make a game at all. By the end of the book you'll be able to put a bmp on the screen and play a sound file.

Also, the back cover says "This book teaches you how to write code and then distribute it to various platforms." Which is kind of a lie!

It never explained how to distribute or even set up Mac OS X or Linux or anything besides setting it up in VC++. I mainly got this book because I want to create a game for Linux and Mac OS X and MS Windows. I had to search online and do a lot of trial and error to eventually get all the samples to compile on Linux and OS X. It never even mentions how to set up SDL on anything other than VC++.

I think this might've been frustrating if you didn't know how to use VC++ and C++ pretty well and wanted to do truly cross-platform SDL code.
After this book I read a couple online tutorials on SDL and am also now reading Programming Linux Games (which has to do with SDL too) and the official SDL documentation and after all that I think I'll have a decent grasp on SDL.

For somebody with pretty good C++ knowledge and at least some VC++ IDE knowledge though it isn't a bad intro to SDL especially for its size. It's a very small book I read it in two days and then spent a day making sense of it all in Linux and Mac OS X besides just VC++ but I don't regret reading it.