Rating: 
Summary: Definite must-have
Review: There are many game programming books out there written for beginning to intermediate programmers, but unfortunately, advanced information is harder to come by, being scattered across web sites, magazines, technical journals, and in small sections of non-game-specific books. Game Programming Gems finally provides a single place where you can find explanations of advanced techniques that are actually being used in modern games. This book covers a broad range of topics and is written by many authors, so naturally, there will be some sections that are more useful to you than others. Overall, though, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game programmer who wouldn't benefit in some way from this book. My only minor complaint is that although the vast majority of the chapters include sample code, not many include a complete demo. Although you can easily create your own project to dump the sample code into, it would have been nice to be able to immediate launch a demo as I read each section. That one shortcoming isn't enough to stop me from giving this a 5 star rating. I highly recommend it to any intermediate to advanced game programmer who wants to take it to the next level.
Rating: 
Summary: Gems among Coal
Review: There are some very good articles in this book, and there are also some bad ones. I strongly recommend flipping through a copy on the shelf on the articles that have caught your attention before you make a decision to buy. Some of the articles represent only introductions to concepts and won't be anything new if you already have a good text on the subject. It was my feeling most of the AI topics were this way.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but inconsistent quality
Review: This book has a lot of good stuff, but is far from perfect: (1) The table of contents are off by one page between p.161-217 (2) The "Interactive Simulation of Water Surfaces" gem describes calculating a mesh point from its four neighbors, to the top, bottom, left, and right. However, this doesn't give a very circular ripple; it's almost square with rounded corners. To fix this, the four diagonal neighbor values should be used as well, scaled by the square root of 2. (3) The "Wavelets: Theory and Compression" gem does a good job of explaining basic Wavelet theory, but does not give any information about how to do compression, except to mention it is possible. This is hardly a gem, it is more an introductory article. Overall, a good book, but some of the gems are not as useful as others.
Rating:
Summary: Add another book to the close bookshelf
Review: This book has finally replaced Graphics Gems I as the book that spends the least amount of time on the bookshelf. Everybody around the office who has spent time with it loves it. Well worth the cost.
Rating:
Summary: Shiny gems for all levels of game programmers
Review: This book is a collection of articles with game programming as the common theme. It does not cover game design so don't get disappointed about this. The articles cover many of the subjects concerned in game programming and are divided into the following categories: General Programming, math, AI, Geometry and Pixel Effects. Some articles are introductory articles in their field and some are true gems that actually give information that cannot be found anywhere else. The introductory articles are good for those who don't know a field and allows an easy way to learn about it - one that gave me real new insight is Pete Isensee's introductory article about metaprogramming. Of course, if you already are an expert in the discussed field then the article will not bring anything new. The articles are of highly varying quality. Some are excellently written and some not worth the paper they are written on - but all in all this book is a must-have for any game programmer. The articles are also targeted and different reader groups. Some are pretty and easy to understand while others require advanced college math and physics to follow. To beauty of this is that beginners can grow with the book and understand more and more of it as they learn more - while getting an idea of what the field of game programming has to offer. This book cannot be recommended as a book for beginning programmers or people new to game programming. They should read other books first. However, for the serious game programmer it can be highly recommended. If the book only contained its good articles I would have given it 5 stars, but as it stands now it can only get 4. Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, R&D
Deadline Games
Rating:
Summary: An instant classic!
Review: This book is a must-have for all who are serious about game programming. The book is a collection of some choice articles concerning game programming. One warning, however, is that these articles were written by professionals to (for the most part) professionals. If you are just starting out in the game programming field, be warned that the purpose of this text is not to teach you how to program games, but rather techniques for producing effects, good AI, etc. A better book for the beginner would be Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus by Andre LaMothe.
Rating:
Summary: A First-Of-Its-Kind Introduction to Game Programming
Review: This book is hands-down the best book yet published on game programming. I have yet to find any other book that begins to approach the excellence of Game Programming Gems in terms of the breadth and depth of the subjects covered. GPG will serve as an excellent introduction to a broad variety of game programming techniques for those new to the industry, and an invaluable desk reference and for more experienced game developers. As a 7-year industry veteran, I can't count the number of times the techniques in this book would have proven useful in the past. Of particular interest are Steve Rabin's excellent chapters on the A* algorithm, the cornerstone of (most) pathfinding in computer games. These chapters go far beyond the explanation of the algorithm itself and serve up a host of rare and valuable insights for getting the most out of your pathfinding in an actual game environment. I have no doubt that this book will have a significant impact on the state of the art in the game development community, and one can only hope that this book is only a hint of what's to come.
Rating:
Summary: The Best of the Worst
Review: This is seriously the worst book I own, I'm not saying that this book is bad, I've just seen better. I don't mind owning it, but if I would have had more time to glance it over in the book store, i definetly wouldn't have paid what i did for it, ... If your looking for a learning book, than this isnt for you, if your looking to learn a thing or two, and i really mean a thing or 2(since thats about all you'll learn), then go ahead and blow your hard earned money on it. ... this book could have been better. Imagine if you gathered a few online articles on different subjects, printed em', slapped a hardcover on it, and titled it 'Game Programming Gems', you would essentially have this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Do NOT buy this book without actually reading a chapter or
Review: two -- very carefully -- in a bookstore. I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. You will be tempted to buy it at first because the book is well made -- it's cute to look at, printed on acid-free, thick paper, font selection is very good, pleasing and clear. Don't fall for these mechanical attractions! Evaluate the contents. It's truly not a book; it's more of a collection of perfunctory commentary to some source code on the disk (of unknown quality and/or usefulness.) The writing is mostly abhorrent (with the exception of the sections written by LaMothe and another guy whose name escapes me at the moment; Lamothe is good and can write, not only program); a lot of stuff is simply not explicated, the selection of the actually printed code is haphazard and unhelpful vis-a-vis the text. Since the quality and usefulness of the stuff on the disk is anyone's guess as well (and based on the text, it's nothing awesome), I don't think this book deserves the acclaim that it seems to get. Several chapters are wasted on annoying bs about hungarian notation, development process (a la Code Complete), absolute banalities about using STL (very superficial, w/o any linkup with games programming -- just buy an STL book if you need to learn it, you won't get anything out of the Gems book itself.) There's a section on templates where the writers seemed more concerned with hugely impressing the reader with the supposedly latest-and-greatest template tricks than offering something useful (look for matrix classes -- they propose the stuff as some kind of generic mechanism (thus, templates), yet what they do will be totally useless for more than 3x3 matrices, and those can be simply coded manually if you need this kind of optimization, which is inlining and unrolling, really -- and keep in mind that it's only small loops that can be gainfully unrolled coz if it doesn't fit in the cache... you know where I'm getting to... moreover, with branch prediction, normal loops may perform better than when unrolled; at any rate, a regular, less-fashionable approach could result in simpler code; but they gotta show off their templatizing skill, wow, I'm impressed, another piece of pompous nonsense suitable for the C++ Report... too bad it's useless practically for 4-and-above dimensional matrices. Generality that doesn't apply generally... an overdesigned particular case, that's what it is.) Most other chapters are written in a very typical halting, disjointed, and ungrammatical geeky-speak, and I don't mean terminology or technicalities, I mean an irritating inability of most contributors to organize and articulate their thoughts. Like I've already mentioned, it's printed on thick paper, if printed on normal paper, it'd be half the size. The binding is not good, my copy has already fallen apart, and it's not that I use it all the time. The only potentially fruitful side of this book is bibiography; iow, you can use it as an catalogue of diverse methods used in programming, and when you're interested in something, follow the bibliography in order to really learn about the topic. The bibliography is fairly extensive, obviously recent; includes many web-sites with papers, etc. So that's good of course. Overall though, the book is mediocre and too expensive for what it is. I would't buy it for more than $. 'course I've already bought it for more, but you don't have to. My opinion is, it's a clear thumbs down.
Rating:
Summary: Very good and worth every cent!
Review: Well, the fact that the Contents alone are 13 1/2 pages long should give you a good hint that this book covers a LOT of stuff! Although it doesn't go into great depth in some places, it does tell you what you need to know to get what it does cover done, and has plenty of code, along with descriptions of what the code does, mathematical formula's, illustrations where necessary, etc.. One thing that should be noted about this book on Amazon, is that the "table of contents" link on the left is pretty inaccurate, the book covers a lot more than what's listed there. Overall, I have to say that this book will save me a lot of time and headaches, and I recommend it to anyone who is also in the industry, or who wants to be. It's not that the stuff the book covers can't be found elsewhere, or on the web, but it's all in the one place, so it saves time. You should also remember that this is only the first book in what will be a series, just like the Graphics Gems series, so there's more to come, and I plan on buying them all if they're anything like this one.
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