Customer Reviews

Linux Game Programming w/CD (Prima Tech's Game Development)

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

 

 

I've bought every book in the series so far, this is by far the worst book I've ever owned. I'm tired of picking up game programming books that claim to teach game programming but they don't even create a working game. I bought this book for Linux game programming exposure and because it promised to having in-dept coverage of AI. Major areas of AI are basically defined and the only source code that is mentioned / supplied on the cd is for a template for creating a counter-strike bot. The author has a very good writing style because I was lured into reading most of the book; however, the book should actually do what it says and at least create a 2D / 3D shooter of some sort rather then just a hand full of demos. This book should have never been published on the basis that it tries to cover way too much which results in chapters that do nothing more then just cover a broad definition of the topic at hand.

I've never been so disappointed with a computer book purchase. This book claims to be about programming games for Linux. However, it falls woefully short of this mark. I will admit it does have some code snippets, but these are very few and extremely buggy. To top things off, the author rapidly skims over most topics in a manner that is more akin to a theoretical discussion than instructional guide. I highly recommend saving your money.

This book is a good overview of what gaming libraries are out there for programming in linux and some fundamentals on getting several of those gaming libraries. But that's it...

I've found the book to be extremely lacking in depth or finished code samples. It gives snippets on how to accomplish something then leaves you hanging. Plus there are quite a bit of syntax errors in the code that can leave a beginner quite frustrated. Nothing is worse than cutting and pasting code from a book word for word and not having it compile because of poor book editing.

The author tries to cover everything from sound, to video, to AI, to networking - with several different libraries - in a 300 page book. And a good fifty of those pages are concerning the gpl and other licenses. Knowing about the GPL and about open source is great, but not when I spent money on game programming (video, sound, ai). What this results in is less than 10 pages on one particular topic.

To sum up: browse this book in the bookstore and then keep moving. Buy yourself a better C++ or OpenGL book instead. Or just go online - better information exists out there.

This book must have been rushed to print. The author couldn't seem to make up his mind whether his audience were complete newbies or experienced programmers. He explains what a union is in the C language but does not define the word blit. He talks at length about programming alpha values (as in red, green, blue and alpha) but does not define alpha until chapter 5. I learned more from John Hall's four-page article in Linux Journal than I did from the first 4 chapters of this book. There is some good information in chapters 5-7 but the rest of the book seemed like fluff to me.

There is so little information per chapter that the Table of Contents serves as a good index. The actual index is not much good and the glossary is completely useless. When I'd finished reading the book I was unsure whether I needed both SDL and GLUT or only one of them. The author mentions that we might want to use a graphics modeller and that he's included one on the CD but tells us nothing about how to use one. I've never been so disappointed in a programming book.

The topics covered should have taken up a volume at least twice the size, so too much was glossed over. Also I found the errors were just too many, not just minor ones as another reviewer noted: e.g. wrong SDL_Init parameters (he lists the correct ones in a table on the same page) or never explaining that to set a video mode you need to add a declaration (I found it in the original SDL documentation). On the other hand trying to get the examples to work taught me a lot...maybe that was the author's intention?

I'm about 4 chapters into Linux Game Programming right now and so far it has been quite interesting and easy to grasp.

The problem I have encountered so far is some mildy annoying code flaws, variables that are either not initialized or change case half way through ex:

int I = 0;

...

i = 2(wow.. when did C become case insensitive?)

Also, things like calling atexit() without mentioning that you need to include stdlib.h , I'm sure a more advanced programmer would have caught that flaw immediately, but it gave me problems for several hours.

I'm in partial agreement with the other review, This is a great book, and its concepts a easy enough to grasp, but the buggy example code may give problems to those who havent programmed extensively before. If you are an intermediate newbie like me, be sure to take a look at the documentation ... and various example programs around the net.

This book was helpful in many regards. It showed the basic idea of how to use the APIs presented. However, allow me to warn that there are many technical errors. When I went to compile and run the included code snippets _as_they_were_written_ I would run into problems like "unrecognized symbol" because of an incorrect or missing include file or a program exiting because it looked for the wrong return value from a funcition. Sloppiness like that leads me to sum up: it could have been better.

Mark Collins, Linux Game Programming (Prima, 2001)

The main problem with reading computer books that are six years old is that, well, they're six years old. This is not a huge problem in the Windows world; as we have seen, sometimes the most current Windows technology will stay around a lot longer than the service contracts mandate. That, however, is almost never the case with Linux, where a massive pool of developers pretty much ensures that things will grow and change on a monthly, if not daily, basis. Still, the basics of the necessary knowledge to get under the hood and tinker with Linux will hold true, so it's not like there's absolutely nothing to gain from a book like this if you're a total newb. (Sorry, I despise that spelling, but if I use the correct one, Amazon filters it for being one letter off from a certain slang term they don't seem to like.)

I am, in fact, that newb. Having finally thrown Microsoft over for good in every aspect of my life I can (I still keep a Windows box around for games, and I have to use it at work), all those database and game projects I was working on will have to be Linux projects now. So I started with what I could get at the library, Collins' six-year-old treatise on Linux game programming. First, let me say that if you're looking for hands-on tutorial stuff, this is not the book for you. Collins is more interested in getting you to understand the concepts--why you want to do something, rather than what it is you want to do. While this is obviously a good thing and leads to programmers who understand more of what they're on about, it's probably worth a caveat emptor for the people who are just looking for shortcuts, or answers to a specific problem. The second thing to be said, then, is that game design itself is the most portable part of any game project. While Collins does delve into some things that are more applicable to Linux development than any other sort (an entire chapter, for example, is devoted to the OpenSource debate), many of the specific tools Collins talks about, and all of the high-level concepts, are applicable to game designers who program for any platform. Thus, I could go two ways here; criticize the book for not really being about Linux specifically, or praise it for being universal?

The problem is, I can't do one or the other. How valuable you'll find it will likely depend on how much reading you've already done on designing games and developing games with C++. If you've done a good deal, you will get the most worth out of the chapters on SDL and openGL/openAL; otherwise, read the whole thing. ***

If you are an absolute beginner to programming games in Linux this book might be useful in that it introduces you to some of the main libraries used in Linux game programming but the book lacks any real information. Even if you read it from cover to cover you still won't know enough to make even the simplest game. The best thing you can say about this book is thay it can give you some hints about where you can really learn to do Linux game programming.

This book sucks plain and simple. Code samples are incomplete and rife with syntax errors. You can learn more by doing a Google search for a few good tutorials.