On the whole, this is a good introduction to game development. I expect it will take 2 or 3 reads and several hours studying the source for it all to sink in. The point of this book is to provide you with a resource to teach yourself the fundamentals of game design on the Android platform. The point is not to allow you to quickly read the book and then bang out the next worlds of warcraft over a weekend. I see a few complaints from people who do not understand the topics presented. You're learning a complicated new subject. Expect to spend some time banging away at it before you fully grasp the material being presented. The book provides a solid grounding in the fundamentals if the reader is willing to devote the time and effort to study and learn. Mr. Nom rocks, just don't expect to understand it all the first time through. If game development was simple, everyone would do it. This book walks you through the development of some simple but not trivial games. My complaint with most programming books is that the code samples are trivial and can't be applied to real world coding. This book does not do that. This book teaches you real world concepts.
That being said, I do have a few minor complaints. The organization of the book could be a bit better. Chapters tend to be very long. Chapter 3 could have been safely separated into 3 or 4 chapters with a little bit more time devoted to explaining the interfaces. Not the code itself, but the reasoning behind the code. Most of the explanation is adequate, but there are definitely places that could use clarification. A little more clarification needed is a frequent theme throughout the book. For instance, the author mentions that Java does not have unsigned types, but due to the power of the two's complement we can safely use signed integer types to store unsigned values. It seems like about a decade ago I took a digital logic course where the two's complement came up. I would guess that most of the readers have never heard of the two's complement and out of those that have, probably only a handful remember it well enough to explain it. If it's important enough to bring up in the text, it's important enough to provide a quick explanation of what it is and why it's important. Two or three sentences would have done the job. There are a number of examples like that throughout the book. Places where a couple of extra sentences would have clarified a topic and bumped this up from a 3 to a 4 star review.
My last complaint is the author's use of 'so-called'. We have so-called color cubes and so-called apis and so-called everything under the sun. I would recommend searching the book for 'so-called' and deleting every instance of it. It adds no value to the book. It's similar to a speaker frequently using the word basically to indicate he is about to provide a simple summation of a complex topic. It's just a pet peeve of mine, and it in no way reflects on the quality of the book.
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