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Rating: 
Summary: Outdated
Review: All who hope to create Quake 4 after reading this book will be disappointed: The game engine described, Jamagic, is rather old and not very powerful. It can be used only for very simple games and simulations. Additionally, the book delivers only a very cursory description of Jamagic. It can be recommended for someone who just starts working with Jamagic for whatever reason, and has no clue how to begin. Not recommended for people who are serious about creating games - there are better tools than Jamagic and better books than this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Way To Learn 3D Game Programming
Review: Elementary Game Programming & Simulators Using Jamagic certainly lives up to its title. As a "green" programmer who just started learning C++, this book was perfect for me in grasping the overall concepts of 3D programming before diving in too deep, yet still using some of the language that I learned. Jamagic "automates" much of the repetitive programming typically done with 3D games, and also the Jamagic language is very similar to Javascript (which is similar to C++); therefore Jamagic worked well for my purposes.Mr. Perez's book took me through the important topics of 3D programming, giving me the overview I wanted and showing me results quickly. The book focuses on three main projects: a simple 3D game, a flight simulator, and a ship simulator. Mr. Perez explains the code in a simple manner that is easy to understand. Each step of each project builds on the previous step. Since this book does have a few typos and inconsistencies that turned me off, I couldn't give it all five stars. All in all, I found this book invaluable for easily learning the concepts of 3D game programming, such as texture mapping, shading, introductory modeling, and calculating distances in 3D with the Pythagorean theorem. I recommend this book for anyone starting out in Jamagic and for those like me who don't want to dive too deep into C++ to learn the concepts of 3D programming.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction to Jamagic
Review: I did not know Jamagic when I first picked up this book. I have found Jamagic to be a very cool 3D game builder tool. The author does a very good job explaining the syntax and has an interesting (non-boring) way of leading the reader thru a complete game project. The sphere lander, flight simulator and ship simulator are also interesting projects you don't see in other books. A person with a lot of other programming experience might find the book a little slow, but if you don't know anything you will not be overwhelmed. I am really looking forward to the advanced version of the book.
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