I have seen this book in the books section, and I have a few noob questions: http://www.gamedev.net/columns/books/bookdetails.asp?productid=362&CategoryID=14 Why does one need SQL for a multiplayer game? Why does one need perl? Cant I do everything in C++? Thanks in advance.

Use the best tool for the job. Don't stay married/enslaved to a single tool, IMHO.

Either way, the theory and approach to how to program is the aspect you should be aiming to glean from a book. Understandable if you do not have any knowledge of the presented language altogether, yes, that makes it hard to glean theory and "tips and tricks" from the text.

Killer Game Programming in Java by Andrew Davison is a book that I am starting into. Yes, it is Java-centric, but Java is very familiar to most C-minded programmers. I highly recommend it. He starts with basic side-scrollers and proceeds into building a full 3D engine for an FPS. He covers sound APIs, graphics programming and Network connectivity between server/client.

Give it a shot. It's an O'Reilly book.

So do I need to know perl and SQL as a prerequest to this book? or does it teach everything you need to know about these two?
For instance, instead of using SQL can't I use std libraries of C++?
Also, I am more interested in FPS game multiplayer games like star wars jedi knight academy 2 (if I remember the name correctly).
Is this the right book for this sort of game?

The book description says that it teaches you the basics of MySQL and Perl, so no, those don't seem to be pre-requisites.

You _can_ do everything in C++: Use a std::vector<struct Player> for your player database, and write it out to file when it changes (and load from file when starting up). Write file processing commands as command-line C++ tools.

However, querying those vectors becomes harder when queries become more complex (what are all the players that have characters greater than level 15, that have not logged in for 30 days but have previously paid us money?). Ensuring durability and consistency of data is really hard in C++ (transactions in SQL do this automatically for you). Writing all your maintainance scripts in C++ will take a long time; perl is much easier when it comes to just dumping out reports or moving files around.

Quote:Original post by hplus0603
The book description says that it teaches you the basics of MySQL and Perl, so no, those don't seem to be pre-requisites.

You _can_ do everything in C++: Use a std::vector<struct Player> for your player database, and write it out to file when it changes (and load from file when starting up). Write file processing commands as command-line C++ tools.

However, querying those vectors becomes harder when queries become more complex (what are all the players that have characters greater than level 15, that have not logged in for 30 days but have previously paid us money?). Ensuring durability and consistency of data is really hard in C++ (transactions in SQL do this automatically for you). Writing all your maintainance scripts in C++ will take a long time; perl is much easier when it comes to just dumping out reports or moving files around.

Ok, that makes sense.
Thanks.