HI there It my first Post. I need your advice about java for games Dev. I have been programming for about 5 year mainly VB, web based scripting languages and Database stuff. I have also produced a game for the GBA using the HAM IDE in C and had a lot of fun doing that. But C was a little frustrating so I thought I would give java a try. I got a simple Java in 24 hours and got start on so simple apps. After that I found a book on Amazon call the black art of java game development or something like but I didn’t check the published date and found out it was printed in 1996 GUTTED. I know that the book will be useful in the sense of OOP principles but would I wasting my time learning some archaic code? If so could you recommend a good book, that wasn’t written at the beginning of time. Thanks Ian Mac

JAVA is a great language for games development. You can prototype things quite quickly and it has a similar syntax to C\C++ and C#, and it's hard to make it do something stupid or destructive. While it is a good language it does have various things that people don't like about it, which you can regualry see people arguing about on GameDev.

There are also some libraries for JAVA based games development such as LWJGL.

I wouldn't worry too much about books being old. Why are you "learning code"? You don't need to learn code you need to learn algorithms, data structures and problem solving techniques. You can look up libary functions in a the docs if you need to, eveyone does wether they admit it or not. These are all pretty standard things, and while an example implementation in a older book might be written in a different language or programming paradigm, that does not make it irrelevant to games programming today. It is about understanding how things work, not learning off pieces of code.

[Edited by - pkelly83 on September 7, 2006 3:45:04 PM]

I agree with pkelly that, no matter how old the book, the principles of the code still stand. Even if the actual syntax might not. However, if you are looking for a more current book on game programming in Java, I just recently picked up Killer Game Programming in Java. It handles game programming in Java very well. But it also explains a lot of the theories / reasons behind the code. Why games are coded the way they are. That is probably the most usefull part of the book, even though the code is great as well.

Mark

Thanks for replying

Your right it’s not the learning the code that’s the problem. I have just had a heap of trouble with the sprite handling class which the book uses. It looks like I was trying to find an easy way out by blaming the book.

Thanks for your advice.

Ian Mac : )