Customer Reviews

Game Programming Golden Rules (Charles River Media Game Development)

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Martin Brownlow, Game Programming Golden Rules (Charles River Media, 2004)

The main thing you need to know about this book is that if you're new to programming, or you've been programming in languages that hide pointers (e.g, VB.NET or C#) and you're not terribly familiar with the pointer architecture of C or C++, you might want to hold off on buying this until you've familiarized yourself with some intermediate-to-advanced programming concepts.

Once you're on the right level for the book, however, you are likely to find it a valuable reference tool as you progress through a project. I'd suggest reading it straight through at least once so you know where to go to find that little tidbit that's tugging at the back of your mind when you're trying to figure out what you need to do to, say, optimize your rendering pipeline. After that, keep it on the closest bookshelf to your primary dev machine; you'll be referring back to it on a fairly regular basis unless you have a photographic memory. (...)

First off - this book assumes a familiarity with C or C++. If pointer arithmetic makes you squirm, better hit the language basics books before picking this up. For the rest of you, this book is a valuable resource.

In a few short chapters, the book gives a good primer on some of the more difficult "real" problems beginning game programmers come across. Scripting and using scripted finite state machines is a big focus. Instead of just hooking up LUA to your C engine and using the "magic" macros, the book describes a fly-weight scripting language of your own. The coverage of the resource pipeline and assets is also very good. The book is not the final word on any of these topics, but provides a good grounding and ability to look for more information on each of them. Brownlow has a talent for demystifying some complex topics. One of my all-time favorite game programming books.