iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

P. J. Cabrera (Author), Joachim Bondo (Author), Aaron Fothergill (Author), Brian Greenstone (Author), Olivier Hennessy (Author), Mike Kasprzak (Author), Mike Lee (Author), Richard Zito (Author), Matthew Aitken (Author), Clayton Kane (Author), Dave Mark (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430219688 | ISBN-13: 978-1430219682 | Publication Date: June 24, 2009 | Edition: 1

iPhone Games Projects is the first book specifically about developing games on the iPhone, the most popular application category on Apple’s App Store. The iPhone has quickly become the hottest new game platform and all the major game developers are entering the market. Not only is the money to be made for developers selling games, but it’s just a hell of a lot of fun for everyone involved

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ten authors, ten successful iPhone game developers, and each with a unique story.

Product Details

• Paperback: 258 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430219688
• ISBN-13: 978-1430219682
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For Advice Only, June 28, 2009

By 

S. Carmody (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

There is some practical knowledge in this book, but it is not what I was expecting when I purchased it. I ordered the book before it was released, so that is my mistake. But the title and description of the book is misleading.

This is not a book with details on a variety of games with hands-on programming examples and ideas on how to make the gameplay work well on the iPhone. It is a collection of chapters of iPhone game building advice. The advice is often excellent, and the book is a unique source for this information. But know that you will bump into phrases like "I hope I've inspired you" and "the true future of iPhone game development is up to you, dear reader". So the advice is also often cheesy, bathetic, and almost maudlin.

Imagine if you met an experienced iPhone developer that had just finished a big project. Then you asked him/her: "Have any advice for me when building an iPhone game"? That is what this book is. If you feel that would help you, then dive on in.

IMHO, this was not enough material worthy of an entire book. Some chapters are excellent, but many of them read as if they would be magazine articles. They are that general and light on details.

I have several of the Apress books, and this one is a disappointment. I finished it in 2 hours and don't feel there will many times I will pull it off the bookshelf in the future. This book should be called "iPhone Advice and Occasional Tips from Game Developers".

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grab bag of iPhone game dev, July 3, 2009

By 

Joel Davis - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

In the past, I have worked on game development projects on PC, xbox360, ps2, ps3 and Wii. Like many developers these days, I'm 'dipping my toes in the water' with casual iPhone game dev.

What I liked about this book:

First, the best thing about this book, and really what makes it worthwhile, is that it's written by people that are actually making their livelihood by developing games on the iPhone. So the advice is all very concrete, practical and the examples all come from the real world.

The technical advice ranges from very general stuff, to moderately technical. Often the advice is worthwhile to casual game dev in general, but not specific to iPhone.

The chapters that did provide code samples or downloads were very useful, and the code was good, real-world examples. The chapters tended to illustrate a particular tip or trick, which could be very helpful if that was something useful to you, but might be completely useless if not. For example, if (like myself) you are hoping to write games in C/C++ (mostly) that can be released on both iPhone and desktop, then the chapter on cross platform development is extremely helpful. But if you are targeting iPhone only, it's not very relevant.

Also, the quality of the book was very good, with full color illustrations throughout.

What I didn't like:

Calling this "Projects" is very misleading. Very few examples are 'projects', i.e. walking you through a tutorial-style project that you can recreate. If you are familiar with the "Game Programming Gems" series, then this book is much closer to that -- a collection of tips, tricks and techniques from practitioners.

Some of the advice (for example, the "Design Doc" chapter, or the "Interface Design" one) is good advice for game development, but not particularly specific for the iPhone. If you are familiar with the process of game development on another platform, a lot of this will be familiar advice.

In particular, I was disappointed not to see much discussion of the iPhone's unique input features like the accelerometers and multi-touch.

Overall, this is a good book but it has a bit of an identity crisis. Some of the articles are fairly technical, while others are appropriate for beginners (or even non-programmers "game designers"). There's a little something for everyone in here, but the flip side of that means that there will probably be a few chapters that you could live without.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Book, but you MUST understand its purpose, October 14, 2009

By 

Scott Newman (Tampa, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

Note: For the sake of full disclosure, let me state that I offered to review the book and I was sent a PDF copy.

The short review: This is a good book full of interesting nuggets of information from people who have written iPhone games. This is NOT a "how to program iPhone games" book. If that's what you are looking for, you will be very disappointed as some of the other reviewers were.

The longer review:

I really enjoyed the information presented in the book. The information presented is not unlike sitting around with a bunch of programmers and asking them for mini lessons and tips. You're not going to build any projects from start to finish, and each chapter is a separate chunk of information.

That being said, you're going to get a lot of exposure to code snippets and general ideas. The chapter on RESTful web services shows you how this approach is incorporated into a game project. There's a great chapter on how to design games, not from a programming perspective, but from a general design perspective. There's an interesting chapter on code optimization and how to use shark to do profiling.

The topics presented are a loose collective of general tidbits all falling under the concept of iPhone game programming. It's almost like you went to a conference and these were a handful of random sessions that you sat in on.

I would have given the book five stars it it was a little more code-centric. After all, I'd like a bit more of a take-away besides the intangibles presented. I'm sure I'm going to apply these concepts once I find the game programming book that actually teaches me game programming theory and practice.

If you like this book, I *highly* recommend "iPhone Cool Projects". It's more code-centric than this one, but still has that loose feel that lets you jump into any chapter out of order.