Customer Reviews

Pro Android Games (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

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

 

 

I recently bought 6 android/game development books to get the information I want, and read all of them from cover to cover.

This is the only one I needed, the rest were either too theoretical or irrelevant.

This one really hits the nail on the head and gives me exactly what I need to make games.

However it was written before the NDK came out, ignore everything the book says about the ARM toolset because it is included in the NDK.

Another thing - they should have mentioned the possibility of using game engines instead of writing your own from scratch.
The two commercial engines that you care about are ShiVa and Unity. And for open source - Irrlicht.
Big advantage with these engines - you can easily port your game to iPhone and other platforms too.

This book will be obsolete ~6 months from now after the Android team removes its collective cranium from its collective digestive endpoint in response to the IPhone continuing to clobber it with better games despite the frustratingly unexposed hardware superiority of recent Android phones like the Droid and the Nexus One. And that time will be the moment they release the Android equivalent of DirectX. Interpreted Java without a JIT to back it up crossed with some very limited media APIs just isn't enough to compete with compiled C and a much more robust media API on the IPhone. And I apologize for the short editorial, but I need it to set the stage for why you should indeed buy this book even though it will soon be irrelevant.

For if you need to write native-level games now, this is the book to buy, now. It's full of typos, it needed another round of proofreading, and it's already dated somewhat by NDK 1.6, but it shows how to get games like Wolf3D and Doom running in C on the Android and it's in print rather than out there on a set of disparate web pages. There's nothing else out there like it at the moment.

5 stars for content as it really does deliver on the goods and 3 stars for coherency and lack of sufficient proofreading.

I like the book a lot. It's exactly what I was looking for: using Java with native code for game dev on Android. The only problem is that it's on Android 1.6, which is rather old at this point. The concepts are still applicable, though.

For $30 this book is tiny, to make matters worse, look inside and there are huge screenshots of the UI, and the full source code for examples (rather than just excerpts where I can download the source), Also the page margins are excessive.

VERY DISAPPOINTED.

This could have easily been an online tutorial and not a book. TERRIBLE

it goes in easy steps from learning simple graphics to complex 3d ones,
i fully recommend it to serious people who have enough patience to learn making complex games for android platform

I love author's direct approach - he doesn't waste time/pages talking about how things should be done, he presents it through code.