Customer Reviews

Game Programming Gems 3 (Game Programming Gems (W/CD)) (v. 3)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While normally, I don't write reviews, I HAVE to disagree with a previous review on this.. Someone wrote the matrix calculations were wrong on "Real time UI input in 3D games", and its simply not true. I'm using this gem currently and found it to work wonderfully! I found the book to be good overall, with a few minor publishing errors, but still good and worth the investment.

Like Gems 1 and 2, its a must have for any game programmer shelf... I'm finding more and more modern approaches to problems, vertex shading, etc in the newer gems series.. Gems 1 holds a special place in my heart because of how breakthrough it was, but this, which not as staggering in its signficance, is just as important to the modern game programmer.

For anyone who actually works as a game programming professional, I'd highly recommend this book. Those of you looking for general-purpose interesting programming tidbits, try one of Scott Meyer's books instead, which I'd recommend to ANY C++ programmer, not game programmers.

One thing to note: I've heard claims (regarding this and previous books in the series) that these books are simply pre-existing articles pulled from the web and other sources and packed into a collection to be resold. This is nonsense - every article in the book was submitted by programmers, and was exclusively commissioned and paid for by the publisher for use in this series. You won't find these articles floating around on the net. Moreover, because these articles are commissioned, peer-reviewed, and professional edited, the overall quality is much higher than random articles found on the net.

Overall, this book, and the entire series for that matter, gets my highest recommendation. You're naturally not going to find every article or topic useful or relevant, but if you're actually in the trenches, the likelyhood of finding at least one article that really helps you out is likely high. In my experience, simply finding one really valuable article is worth the price of the book alone.

I've noticed several scathing reviews from folks who admit in the review that they aren't even game programmers. Am I missing something? How in the world could this book be at all useful or interesting to someone who admittedly has no interest in programming games? Unbelievable.

For anyone specifically interested in actually using this book to develop games, you're going to get your money's worth.

I got his book for my husband, who is a programmer, and this one is his favorite of the series. He refers to it on a regular basis, and he says it has saved him valuable time. The graphics sections are especially usefull. A handy reference book for any programmer.

If you are a software developer this series should be somewhat mandatory reading. While the focus is on games much of the material should be common knowledge for software engineers. I did however like all of the book because it really shows that these authors are "in the trenches" so to say. For the seasoned developer it may be somewhat a waste of time but I would be surprised if everyone did not take something away from this book. The low level compiler examples for instance, using Lex and Yacc was pretty interesting but it left me wanting more and I ended up researching it on the Internet.

The first two books seem to pack more for the punch.

As game developer i pre-ordered GPG3 months before release of the book. I read most of the book articles and i think the book has less quality than GPG1 and GPG2. There are essential errors in the book as totaly wrong projective matrix values in "Real-Time Input and UI in 3D Games" article and vectors equations in Mathemathics Part. The Graphics and Network Multiplayer Parts have some good ideas and conceptions and are much better than General Programing , AI and Math.
I recomend the book but be careful with the examples, don't rely on correct developer ideas.

It's a little high-level, but it contains many useful ideas and uses of different algorithms for game programming.

While Gems 1 will always have a special place in my heart, this book solidly builds on the foundation of Gems 1 & 2.
New techniques are revealed, and previous ones are expanded and enhanced. Every phase of game design is covered, from design to AI to graphics to audio.
If you are a game designer, you cannot afford to pass this one by.

The Game Programming Gems books are fat and full of good ideas. Unfortunately, these ideas are only really useful to beginning programmers; anyone who has programmed seriously for more than two years will know 90% of the material in the book series.
The remaining 10% of the book is remarkably good, with innovative ideas on how to approach problems. But Charles River Media decided to lengthen the book with such trivialities as how to use the C++ Standard Library and using Direct3D. Most of the material in the GPG series is covered better, and in more depth in other books which don't have the word "game" in their title.

I pre-order this book before release. I'm not a game programmer but I work in software programming/design for 13y
The book is much worst than the GPG1 GPG2.
The samples and articles are poor, and the mumbo-jumbo `stl' tricks are cheap. After I've read GPG1/2 and some of GPG3 I can say that 90% of information from these GPG's books is available for free on several sites of game tutorials on Internet.