Hello, This is my first post on this foum!:) I'm a newbie to programming(c++) and game programming. I saw the GameTutorials Squared CD and I need opinions becouse I'm thinking about buy it... So what do you think?Is it a good choice? PS:Sorry for my bad English :) Bye!

The tutorials are good but I wouldn't buy them.

For years they had them all free of charge but stopped it a few years back which was unfortunate.

Digiben's tutorials were great because he had a clean coding and commenting style and taught theory. "The Tutor's" I didn't care for so much because his code looked all jumbled and was more difficult to follow. Digiben focused on OpenGL and The Tutor focused on Direct3D. The meat of the tutorials was in the comments section because that's where all the theory and algorithm explanations went. The code itself was actually kinda secondary because once you understood the theory that was explained in the comments section the actual syntax used for implementation wasn't all that important.

I think people critique the wrong things when it comes to those tutorials. The tutorial's try not to get too advanced with buffer arrays etc because they want to keep things simple and their main goal is to show concepts.

I personally found them to be very educational, however since they are no longer free most of what they teach can be found on other websites that are free.

Ok I understand ;)
But are there any positive comments?
Does The Cd came with a sort of textbook?

Quote:Original post by DrakeFG
Ok I understand ;)
But are there any positive comments?
Does The Cd came with a sort of textbook?

No. It's just a collection of tutorials.

Again the codedumps themselves don't teach much. It's the comments that are gold. The author has a unique tutorial style in that he doesn't have some web page or something that you read along with. The comments in the code are worth more than the code itself. What he does for each tutorial is provide a visual studio project containing the code. As you begin to go through the code you'll see a simple block of code that is maybe 3 or 4 lines long. Before that though you'll see a 20 line comment block that explains what those 3 - 4 lines do and the theory behind them. That's where you learn. For GameTutorials and DigiBen's style the code itself is secondary to the theory presented in the comments.

If you just take the code and cut and paste it then you'll learn nothing. If you actually look at the code and read his comments you'll learn plenty.

There are usually a few free tutorials and examples posted on his site. Download a few and check them out (they are probably intermediate topics though so go slowly).

Again READ THE COMMENTS because that is where the theory behind the code is presented. For example take a tutorial on shadowing. The actual shadowing code may be just a few lines long however he'll have a huge comment block before that code detailing the theory behind the method of shadowing that he's using. He also tries to break things down into pieces across tutorials. For basic collision detection he started with a line segment/plane intersection tutorial, then did a line segment/polygon intersection tutorial, then a point of intersection tutorial, then a sphere/polygon intersection tutorial etc. Each code dump had embedded comments describing the maths and theory behind each collision in detail at the relevant code points.

Unfortunately they are no longer free. I was fortunate enough to discover the site before he started charging and I was able to learn from the tutorials while they were still free of charge.

Are they great tutorials? I think so. Are they worth $70? That's a good chunk of change so I'm forced to say no, just because $70 isn't chump change to the average joe.

[Edited by - atimes on July 25, 2008 4:09:12 PM]

Ok so i won't use it!
I'm studyin C++ now from the Deitel&Deitel Book...What do you think about it?

Quote:Original post by DrakeFG
Ok so i won't use it!
I'm studyin C++ now from the Deitel&Deitel Book...What do you think about it?

IMO Deitel&Deitel books are great books. They truly do an excellent job of TEACHING the material.

I learned C++ using Deitel and Deitel.

I hated it at the time (it's pretty dry), but it's actually quite good and comprehensive.