Rating: 
Summary: Un-freaking-believable!
Review: For the longest time I was a huge fan of the popular Game Programming Gems books from Charles River Media. That all changed the day this unbelievable book showed up in the mail. While Game Programming Gems tries to squeeze *sixty* different authors into a book that only spans about 7-800 pages, Game Programming Tricks of the Trade is a whopping 1000+ pages, and instead focuses on fewer articles-- about 20-- giving each author more than enough space to write an article that actually TEACHES you something!It took a book like this to show me that books like Game Programming Gems, despite their five star reviews and huge followings (which I now find baffling), are really just useless. For example, Game Programming Gems 2 has an article entitled "A Generic Fuzzy State Machine in C++". How many pages were alloted for this article? 20? 30? 40? Try FOUR AND A HALF. Without even a single line of code! The idea that anyone can actually learn from something like this is preposterous. Meanwhile, let's take a look at some of the *real* gems, which you'll find in Tricks of the Trade: - Trick 18: Terrain Collision with Quadtrees. 30 full pages, with a TON of diagrams and lots of fully explained code listings. - Trick 14: Space Partitioning with Octrees. Pick up a copy of Game Programming Gems if you want a 2 page article where the author explains what the term "octree" means and throws some useless calculus at you. Pick up this book if you want a nearly 50-page article on HOW IT'S ACTUALLY DONE. You'll get code listings, plenty of diagrams, and at the end, suprise suprise, you'll have actually learned how to use octrees in your own game. I'm currently using this one in my own engine, and can personally attest to its quality. - Trick 17: Introduction to Quaternions: Over 30 pages of real information (this one written by Andre Lamothe himself) on how quaternions actually work and how you can apply them to real games... Gems is great when you want to learn some new vocabulary to impress your friends. Tricks of the Trade is what you need, however, if you actually want to do something. The bottom line is that Gems did little more than give me a basic conversional and theoretical knowledge on relatively dry subjects. Tricks of the Trade is over a thousand pages of fun, interesting, and USEFUL articles that I'm *already* finding immediate uses for. I feel like a better game programmer already, and I can't recommend this highly enough. Sell your copy of Gems and use the money to buy this today! You won't regret it!
Rating: 
Summary: room for improvement
Review: I give it 3 stars because I am just an amateur beginner and any book with information like this book really appeals.
On the other hand, I would like to congratulate those for exposing the negative aspects of the book. I hope the publishers take heed to whats been said and raise the standards higher for subsequent books. However, that does not mean that the price should be raised significantly. I certainly don't think this book is worth 69 bucks after all thats been said(maybe only half the price). I do not care if I am just an amateur, I would prefer value for money.
Rating: 
Summary: Some misunderstandings?
Review: I have this book and I've found it a useful addition to my game dev shelf. However, I couldn't help noticing the problems some of the other reviewers had with the book. Now, I'm sure these other reviewers are of a high level intelligence, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they simply arrived at some misunderstandings due to a hasty evaluation of the book. For example, one reviewer expressed great distress at the inclusion of the "Introduction to dev studio" and "C++ primer" chapters. Actually, these sections of the book are not part of the main content; rather, they are included as appendices. As mentioned earlier, I'm sure the reviewer was in this case making a simple mistake, as he seems to be extremely knowledgeable about the game development process and the industry at large. He makes various complaints about unnecessary portions of the book (i.e. ASCII table) being included to bloat up the page count. Since I am sure this reviewer is of a high level of intelligence, I'm going to accredit this claim to a brief lapse in cognitive function, possibly one due to epileptic seizure. Similar complaints are made in regard to the inclusion of entire-page chapter headers, and the like. These, also, are probably related to epileptic seizures on the part of the reviewer, since I am sure he is of a high level of intelligence. While some of the complaints made by the reviewer on the uselessness of certain chapters are, in some remote way, slightly valid, his negative perception of the book as a whole is, in my ever humble opinion, hugely flawed.
Rating:
Summary: Finally a compilation book with complete chapters
Review: I own every single graphics gems and game programming gems books, but 90% of the articles in the books are like 1-3 pages; how can anyone learn anything in 1-3 pages? Sure there are some long articles in the books, but they are hard to follow -- Game programing tricks has really long and complete articles and they actually do something. I was really interested in quadtrees, but everyone always talks about them, but no one every does them. I read tricks and now I finally know how it works -- also I am planning on putting the scripting chapter to good use. My advice is this, if you want a whirlwind tour of graphics and game programming then check out the gems series, but if you really want to learn something and put it to use and see ACTUAL WORKING CODE then get this book. I hope they make more!
Rating: 
Summary: A lot of bulk, not many tricks.
Review: I recently purchased this book and I must say I am quite perplexed at the stellar reviews. I did think the book had portions that were well written and flowed nicely, but with a few exceptions, most of the information it contained was not at all useful to a professional developer like myself.
Sure, a lot of pages are devoted to a topic, but the pages are either rambling and garbled, overly simplistic or contain completely outdated material that in no way resembles what is currently being used in commercial development studios. I am almost wondering it the overly gushing reviews are rigged by someone with a vested interest in the book. Notice the repeated use of the asterisks, double dashes and slamming of other books. I hope this is not the case. Perhaps there truly are people out there programming another revamp of tetris or a text based adventure game that need something like this book, but no one at my company. I honestly don't think the book contained many "tricks" and would not purchase it again.
Rating:
Summary: A lot of bulk, not many tricks.
Review: I recently purchased this book and I must say I am quite perplexed at the stellar reviews. I did think the book had portions that were well written and flowed nicely, but with a few exceptions, most of the information it contained was not at all useful to a professional developer like myself.
Sure, a lot of pages are devoted to a topic, but the pages are either rambling and garbled, overly simplistic or contain completely outdated material that in no way resembles what is currently being used in commercial development studios. I am almost wondering it the overly gushing reviews are rigged by someone with a vested interest in the book. Notice the repeated use of the asterisks, double dashes and slamming of other books. I hope this is not the case. Perhaps there truly are people out there programming another revamp of tetris or a text based adventure game that need something like this book, but no one at my company. I honestly don't think the book contained many "tricks" and would not purchase it again.
Rating:
Summary: pretty good
Review: I thought the book was helpful for beginners. I mean lets face it, you can't turn someone who doesn't know anything about programming games into an expert. Beginners have to start small and with the basics, and I think this book is the first step towards that goal (developing games in the industry).
Rating: 
Summary: Mostly Amateur, Hobbyist, and Internet Material
Review: I wanted to like this book, but the truth is, more than 500 pages are useless for real game development. A more accurate title for this book might be:
"Hobbyist Tricks of the Trade for Amateur Games" For example: pp 681-909 (229 pages) "Trick 20: Game Programming Assembly Style"
These 200+ pages are a case study of "SPACE-TRIS", a Tetris clone written *entirely* in Win32 assembly. It is now the year 2002 and no one is programming an entire game in Win32 assembly. That makes over 1/5 of this book useless, not to mention filled with pages and pages of printed assembly code. The first paragraph of the chapter even admits that the whole thing is an updated version of a series of articles that were posted on the INTERNET FOR FREE.... pp 329-452 (124 pages) "Trick 12: Simple Game Scripting"
This could have been an incredible chapter. Certainly enough pages were dedicated to it, but it turns out that the scripting language created is "based loosely on Intel's 80x86 assembly language" (that's a direct quote). The point of a scripting language is to create a higher level language - not a lower level language. This chapter walks you step-by-step though a completely irrelevant and useless example language. Thanks for nothing. pp 169-216 (48 pages) "Trick 7: In the Midst of 3-D, There's Still Text"
You won't believe it, but this is a chapter on making a Text Adventure Game (like Zork), but with zero graphics. While this is interesting, it is strictly in the realm of amateur/hobbyist stuff. Your job interview at a real game company will go great when you mention that you wrote your very own text adventure - just a month ago. They'll try not to laugh. pp 253-277 (25 pages) "Trick 9: 2-D Sprites"
This would have been a great introduction to sprites 15 years ago. However, more than 99% of the games on the PC, PS2, XBOX, and GameCube don't use sprites. In fact, 99% of the games on dead systems like PSX, N64, and Dreamcast don't use sprites either. This material is extremely outdated. pp 279-306 (28 pages) "Trick 10: Moving Beyond OpenGL 1.1 for Windows"
More than 99% of game development is not being done in OpenGL on the PC. DirectX is the only practical choice for PC games at this point. That makes this chapter irrelevant. pp 913-932 (20 pages) "Introduction to Dev Studio"
If you need this info, this book isn't your biggest problem. This is also a reprint from the book "Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX 8.0". pp 933-984 (52 pages) "C/C++ Primer and STL"
If you don't know this, you shouldn't be buying this book. Buy a real book on C++. Even though 50 pages are wasted on this, the writer admits, "It's not really even going to scratch the surface." Then why is it in this book??? pp 141-167 (27 pages) "Trick 6: Tips from the Outdoorsman's Journal"
This is a chapter focused around heightfield rendering. This was state-of-the-art technology when the game Magic Carpet came out 8 years ago in 1994. Now you can find this kind of code for free all over amateur game development web sites. Again, very dated material. pp 567-590 (24 pages) "Trick 16: Introduction to Fuzzy Logic"
This is an updated version of Andre LaMothe's Game Programming Gems paper. This is the only AI chapter in the entire book - and it has no source code demo. For being the only AI topic covered, it seems pretty useless when coupled with the other chapters. It's as if it was included just because it was handy from a previous book. Do you think? pp 991-996 (6 pages) "ASCII Table"
This section is dedicated to printing the ASCII character set!! This is blatant fluff to get the page count up. pp 985-986 (2 pages) "C++ Keywords"
Yes, this is a list of all C++ keywords. And it takes up 2 pages. Tricky. The editors of this book were obviously trying their best to fill as many pages as possible to fool you into thinking you were getting a lot for your money. But the truth is, the book is mostly just bulk... blank pages, chapter titles that take up a full page, useless tables and lists, and, insanely, pages and pages and pages of assembly code. Recap of the facts:
200+ pages are available on the Internet for free.
500+ pages are not applicable to real game development.... Why is this book full of amateur/useless game programming tricks? The answer is because 1/3 of the writers have never programmed games for a living and another 1/3 work at little unknown companies (bios are in the book). To give an example, one of the writers works at a company that makes software for the blind while another is a HIGH SCHOOL student. A great deal of these people are unaware of what is important for real game development. If they knew, they wouldn't have written most of these chapters. Here is a quote from the back of the book: "Game Programming Tricks of the Trade is a compilation of techniques from today's leading game programmers." The irony is rather sad. Bottom Line:
This book is not written by today's leading game programmers. This book is overflowing with amateur material found on Internet hobbyist websites. Whatever you decide, do not buy this book without examining it in person.
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding book for anyone into game development
Review: I've been doing game dev for a number of years now, and it's like a breath of fresh air to come upon a book like this. Clearly written, well organized, and a breeze to read through! My thanks goes out to each and every one of the authors who contributed to this invaluable tome. I'd give this thing six stars if I could. You will not regret buying this book!!!
Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: This book was pretty good. Basically I'd like to echo the other favorable reveiws for this title. A lot of good info for those learning game development. Also, something another reviewer commented on. Another reviewer stated that 99% of games for the PC do not use OpenGL on the PC. This could not be more wrong. Just about every game released for the PC gives you an option to view the game using Direct3D or OpenGL. Every major, and most minor, games programmed out there are programmed in both OpenGL and Direct3D. So anything learned about OpenGL is definately relevant.
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