Rating: 
Summary: A fine collection of papers
Review: As a software engineer, with a strong mathematical background and a masters level acoustics course under my belt, I found this book to be an intersting look into the (pure mathematical) neural systems and the (applied mathematical physics engines) that drive today's gaming industry. As an engineer I know that I can not do everything in this book, but I know that it is equally important to understand what is expected of a real-time engine so that I may find colleagues with those specialties. Gaming is big business,and Game Programming Gems is a great place to learn, and encourage learning.
Rating: 
Summary: The Guide
Review: Before you buy any "I want to be the next John Carmark/John Romero/Sid Meyer/Roberta Willians/Rick Goodman/Big Game Guru" book please check this book. Clever and deep reading removes many spots from "conceptual idea" to "ready to market game" Definetely recommended.
Rating:
Summary: What are you paying for
Review: Despite of the book ambicious objectives of being a compreensive guide to game project and programming techniques, there are some chapters(for example AI and Dead Reckoning alg) that are so valuable that one should consider investing his/her money on it!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Waste your Money!
Review: First Let me mention; I have a Degree in Computer Engineering and as a Senior in college, I took a class in Computer Graphics Using Open GL which required a solid understanding of Linear Algebra. I just bought this book and I am very disappointed. The book is a composition of many articles written by 40 authors. It mainly focuses on the theory behind game programming ( Brush up on your calculus and Linear Algebra...you'll need it! ). I read the book's sypnosis prior to purchasing this book and I don't think it adequately reflects the contents of the book. Also, the cover is mis-leading. This cover is just a teaser to entice you to buy the book. There is no referenced source code or executable for the front cover graphic. Indeed this cover is a game that will be released in the future. If you want to learn how to program video games using Open GL, find a better book. ( the openGL programmer's guide is a good start). As far as Game programming Gems, it's more like a ...um forget it. I intend to get my $75.00 back for this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but most 'gems' are just colored glass
Review: Game Programming Gems aims to follow in the footsteps of the excellent Graphics Gems series, except with articles that apply specifically to game programming rather than focusing solely on graphics. There are some excellent articles in here, but unfortunately many are just very basic introductory material to their respective subjects. They do not have the depth and certainly are not sufficiently groundbreaking to be called 'gems', especially in comparison to the gems presented in Graphics Gems. Many are pretty obvious and can be readily found with even a minimal amount of internet research. That said, the book is still a worthwhile purchase because of convenience; it gathers all of the information on a subject in one place. Still, I'd like to see more real groundbreaking articles, and fewer overviews of technology. Hopefully Gems II (which should be released soon) will remedy this situation.
Rating: 
Summary: Who is this book for?
Review: Good for someone with a LOT of Game Programming EXPERIENCE ( Not me ). Most of the chapters in this book are articles (good articles ) taken from magazines. I just find it funny that so many reviews of this book are so good. I think the author had too many journal articles floating around his desk, so he stapled them together (at random) and made this book.
Rating:
Summary: May find something useful in it
Review: I am for the most part a 2D DirectDraw programmer with some experience in DirectSound and DirectMusic. I only use these APIs and only with Visual C++ 6.0 Standard in Windows XP. So, I cannot sit here and write a lengthy review about how cool I think all the aspects of this book are when I wouldn't use most of the information covered in the book with my own 2D graphics engines. However, there was still a few VERY good articles in this book that can be used by either 2D or 3D programmers, so I'll talk about those because I know them and have used them. The first really good chapter I found is 1.9 "Frame Based Memory Allocation" by Steven Ranck. Teaches you a trick on how to completely eliminate memory fragmentation in your games and speed up memory allocation during run-time, by never using memory allocation in run time. Instead, allocating memory at load time and using that allocation throughout various parts of the program until the program exits. Pretty cool and fast.
But I cannot skip the fact that all the articles in the first section can be used in any type of game (2D/3D) but I haven't gotten as much use out of them yet. There are 14 chapters in the first section total.
Once you get into the section on mathematics, you had better be a math wiz or at least proficiant.... Chapters like "Polynormal Approximations to Trigonomic Functions" means nothing to a 2D programmer like myself. Same goes for the chapter, "Matrix-Quaternion Conversions".
Section 3 goes into AI programming. The only chapters I have really read thoroughly is 3.1, "A finite-state machine class" by Eric Dysband, and 3.3, "Basics of A* For Pathfinding" by Bryan Stout. I found this chapter very useful and the book CD-ROM comes with pathfinding examples written by Bryan that demonstrate what he is talking about. Really useful to me!
Section 4 is completely useless to me because it's all about 3D programming. In fact the section is titled "Polygonal Techniques" and contains 19 chapters.
Section 5 is titled Pixel Effects and I really haven't gotten much out of this section unfortunately. So as you can see, no matter what kind of programmer you are, you can probably get at least one really good tip out of this book. I didn't list all the useful chapters in the book, just the ones that were useful to me. When you read through it, you are likely to find different ones that are just as useful to you.
Rating:
Summary: Well Organized, but stale
Review: I thought it was well organized, but most of the articles/topics can be found on the internet.
Rating: 
Summary: Great variety of practical tips from experts!
Review: I'm very happy with how Game Programming Gems turned out. Game Programming Gems contains over 70 gems written by 40 expert game programmers, and it includes a CD which contains source code for most of the gems. The book covers a wide variety of topics: math, physics, pixel-level shading techniques, polygon management, artificial intelligence, and other good stuff. It's really important when reading about some snazzy algorithm to have source code to play with, so as often as possible we include source code on the CD. We took great pains to make sure this code is very portable. After completing this book I left my position at Nintendo (mentioned in the book description) and joined Game Developer magazine as editor-in-chief. So you can expect to see more great material like these gems in the magazine soon!
Rating:
Summary: Very useful.
Review: I've found this book to be very useful in game programming. The variety of articles an concepts covered is very vast. In fact, that is probably the cause for its only (in my opinion) shortcomming - that many of the articles aren't long or complete enough. An excellent book if you're looking for an introduction to many different concepts.
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