Game Programming Gems

Rating:
Summary: Game Programming Gems, a Game Programmer¿s Bible
Review: What a book! Whether you are just getting around to game programming, thinking about it, or already doing it, this is one book that needs to be on your library shelf. This is a one of it's kind book that deals with some of the most frustrating topics their can be in game programming.

Simulating water and liquids, AI techniques, messages, lens flares, lighting and texturing, body motion equations and randoms and more are talked about in this book, and the best thing is that it is explained and exampled within a few pages (most of the time).

This is like taking most of the articles out their on the net and sticking them inside of a book and selling it, except that everything is explained better, and nicer, for beginners to advanced programmers. If you even THINK about game programming, you'll want to pick this book up! Can't wait for Game Programming Gems II !

Rating:
Summary: Wow, wow, wow
Review: What a fabulous book. As a relatively new game developer, I continue to find this book to be invaluable. It seems like almost everything that I need to know is at least touched on. It's already saved me a great deal of time by teachning good software engineering practices and program structures -- stuff that would have taken me weeks of failure to learn on my own.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: What I did was read this to teach me fundamentals of Game Programming, and then read a directX 8 book to Implement it. Great

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic! Reminds me of why I love programming games...
Review: Wonderful adaptation of the popular Graphics Gems series - every chapter in this book leaves me wanting to whip up some code to test out what is taught. Very technical subject matter that spans a wide variety of topics from AI to 3D to physics. Most highly recommended game programming book I've yet seen -- I'm already waiting anxiously for GPG II, III, and IV :).

Rating:
Summary: Uncovering a GEM.....
Review: Wow...this book covers so many areas. In AI alone, it covers A*, an FSM machine class, Game Trees, 3D movement and pathfinding, flocking, fuzzy logic, and a neural-net primer. It contains other great algorithms on real-time shadows, real-time terrain generation, interactive simulation of water surfaces, wavelets, and many other topics. Definitely a good book to own if interested in game programming or 3D graphics in general.

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic "a la carte" tool kit
Review: Written by a lot of the top professionals in the industry, each section in this book is like sitting in on a roundtable session at the Game Developers Conference. The contributors here are not giving you just theory that you can think about... they are providing TOOLS that they use in a manner that makes it easy for YOU to use in YOUR code.

The only drawback is that there is so much covered in so many different disciplines. You are buying the graphics and networking sections even if you aren't doing graphics and networking. The only way around this would have been to split the books by area... such as Charles River Media did with the "AI Wisdom" book. However, if you cover a lot of areas in your game programming, this book will touch on all of them!

I am personally using the "State Machine Language" by Steve Rabin (Nintendo of America), the gem on implementing a simple singleton class, and will be doing a variant on Steve Woodcock's "flocking" gem. Could I have done these myself? Possibly. However, by using the code on the CD and dropping it into my game project, I have recouped the purchase price of the book at least 1000:1! That's not a bad ROI.

If you are a game programmer, the book will be of value to you. Should you but it? Ask yourself how much YOUR time is worth... if you can save yourself hundreds of hours for ~70 bucks why even hesitate?

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic "a la carte" tool kit
Review: Written by a lot of the top professionals in the industry, each section in this book is like sitting in on a roundtable session at the Game Developers Conference. The contributors here are not giving you just theory that you can think about... they are providing TOOLS that they use in a manner that makes it easy for YOU to use in YOUR code.

The only drawback is that there is so much covered in so many different disciplines. You are buying the graphics and networking sections even if you aren't doing graphics and networking. The only way around this would have been to split the books by area... such as Charles River Media did with the "AI Wisdom" book. However, if you cover a lot of areas in your game programming, this book will touch on all of them!

I am personally using the "State Machine Language" by Steve Rabin (Nintendo of America), the gem on implementing a simple singleton class, and will be doing a variant on Steve Woodcock's "flocking" gem. Could I have done these myself? Possibly. However, by using the code on the CD and dropping it into my game project, I have recouped the purchase price of the book at least 1000:1! That's not a bad ROI.

If you are a game programmer, the book will be of value to you. Should you but it? Ask yourself how much YOUR time is worth... if you can save yourself hundreds of hours for ~70 bucks why even hesitate?