Customer Reviews

iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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".

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.

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.

I have all the Apress series of books for the iPhone, they are a bit of a mixed bunch really and this is a prime example. It is made up of a number of chapters from game developers, some are totally useless such as the chapter about the chess game - talk about filler. Some advice is good such as coding a game in C/C++ and using the minimum of obj-C, but if, like me, you were doing this anyway it's old hat. None of the examples even showed how to run sprite animations, nor were they projects as such, still with some effort it might be possible to get some help from the book, but if you are looking for a good iPhone Game book this is not it.

I had look at this book on amazon before and decided not to buy it because of all the negative reviews. When I finally saw this book in my local book store, I thought I'd take a peek. I thought it was rather interesting, a lot more promising than most reviews gave it credit for anyway. So I ordered it, but had very little time to read through it. A few weeks after I had it, I had a real problem on the Iphone game I was working with, long story short : after adding sounds and trying the game out on my ipod instead of the iphone it was crashing because of lack of memory. Turns out there's a nice chapter about optimization in one of these chapters that really helped me out. Instead of hunting the internet for different tips and tricks, I read the chapter in 15-20 min which covered sounds and images optimization plus the tools used for profiling the iphone sdk. The book payed for itself that very night.

There's many books that take the approach of multiple authors with each their own tips and stories. Maybe these stories in this weren't as pertinent for people as the GPU gems, or game programing gem. Me on the other hand, I try to get all the information I can get, especially from successful game makers. From Game Developer Magazine, to Gamasutra, post-mortem are a very important aspect of my learning process for creating better games. This book was no exception.

I join the previous reviewers in their disappointment, but the most amazing thing about this book is that the material written by the book's Lead Author PJ Cabrera is such a terrible mess. First of all, the topic is barely relevant for games development, but ok, web services can be used for anything. Then PJ throws in some snippets of Rails that are incomprehensible for those who doesn't know Rails and trivial for those who does. Why were they needed at all? But then we are coming to iPhone development, finally, and this is where I am beginning to feel a doubt in the author's overall competence. He is using a UITableViewController and creates an outlet for UITableView in it... Hey, look at your own screenshot on page 35 and you will see that this controller already has a table view connected to an outlet.

I gave this book two stars because I hope it will become more useful for me after I learn more about Open GL from some other source. Otherwise, I would give it just one star. I wonder if Dave Mark whose name is on the cover has ever looked into the book.

I found this book to be only slight informative. I recognize that all the authors have created (or been involved) with successful iPhone applications but this book is basically project 'postmortem' articles similar to what you'll find on [...]Not worthy of a book. One thing in particular stood out. The author/creator of BugDom (which I've played) said it was about 500,000 lines of C code. 500,000? Really? Does anyone remember AoE. I believe that was about 220,000 lines of code.. Thing's that make you say, "hmmm"...

Buying books before you've checked it's review status... definitely NOT priceless. Spend your money and time elsewhere.

I've been buying every book on Objective-C and the iPhone SDK that I can get my hands on and I was really excited about this book since few really ever go into any kind of depth on games.

I was very disappointed when I cracked open the book only to find it was mostly just stories from people who had made games, and nothing on the actually creation of games. I didn't want a book of stories, I wanted to learn techniques for game design.

If you actually want to learn how to make games and not just hear about people who have then avoid this book. I'm very disappointed that Apress published this since the rest of the iPhone books I've bought from them have been very helpful.

I was excited to have this book on the way and finally crack it open. It took a few hours of reading/skimming to realize that this is not the book you want if you're just starting to write games for the iPhone. Actually there was one good chapter on iPhone game development, the Space Hike tutorial. Unfortunately, that was just one chapter out of a whole book.

While the case studies in this book do contain isolated nuggets of advice and best practices, this book is little more than an opportunity for individual developers to boast, toot their own horns, and promote their products or companies. Very little in the way of condensed knowledge to guide developers. As a collegiate instructor who has taught iPhone development, I would only recommend this book as supplemental reading or for use in discussing or dissecting individual case studies. I would advise any developer wishing to obtain detailed knowledge to invest his or her money elsewhere.