Not read it myself, it though looks quite good upon reviews on it. I belive most books are good, it's more depending on your own will to learn what's inside it.

In this particular book it states you should have a good knowledge of C++, and it builds upon SDL and Open GL while also learning you the fundamentals of Win32 programming which is essential for moving on to DirectX. Moreover you seem to build a game along the book, which I think is great for a beginner to do as learning from examples is by far the fastest way.

Like I said it seems good, like most books.. but often books simply tend be what you are willing to put into them yourself.

Good Luck.

Quote:Original post by DayZero
Like I said it seems good, like most books.. but often books simply tend be what you are willing to put into them yourself.

What about disinformation books? Which is by far over half that get good reviews for some strange reason.

I made the mistake of buyi9ng this book. It is not for beginners! You need to be very comfortable with a huge amount of unneeded abstraction, know OpenGL and SDL very well before reading, and on top of that, all you get is an asteroids game out of this horribly lame deal. Oh yeah and did I mention it practically forces Visual studio 2003 on you!

My advice: get Focus on SDL, or Beginning Opengl game programming, or OpenGL game programming.

As always, my humble opinion. Please excuse my spelling, im in a hurry!

I agree with the previous post as it definately isnt a book for the new beginner in game programming. It explain the fundamentals of game programming in a object-oreintation way. It was useful for me as im getting use to programming SDL-C++ and this book is everything i will need for the meanwhile. I only got this book today, and I rate it ok at the moment, but I havent gone into it in depth yet. It is a good book for someone who is proficiant in C++, but if you are a newbie, don't expect to pick it up straight away. It has interesting points such as the basics of OpenGL rendering pipeline and mouse selection and other parts which you can get in any other larger books, that go into more concise detail. It is a good book for an intermediate, but I was disappointed as it didnt explain and go into things in as much details as I would expect in a full blown, newly released book.

The CD is okay, as the sourcecode gives you an idea on how to do game logic, but it isnt a book that explains much about using modern 3D sophisticated rendering techniques. But it does go into developing the logic of game programming in as easy detail a SDL newbie would find useful.

Quote:Original post by Gameteen
I made the mistake of buyi9ng this book. It is not for beginners! You need to be very comfortable with a huge amount of unneeded abstraction, know OpenGL and SDL very well before reading, and on top of that, all you get is an asteroids game out of this horribly lame deal. Oh yeah and did I mention it practically forces Visual studio 2003 on you!

My advice: get Focus on SDL, or Beginning Opengl game programming, or OpenGL game programming.

As always, my humble opinion. Please excuse my spelling, im in a hurry!

Just to provide a bit of correction here..

It doesn't "force" any IDE on you. I do stress that all the libraries/source code can be built with any IDE that the 3rd party libraries support. This includes Visual Studio 6.0/.NET2003/.NET2005, along with DevCPP (though you'll have to import the code)...

Quote:all you get is an asteroids game out of this horribly lame deal

Not a problem, it gives you the tools to make your own.