Mathematics for Game Developers (Game Development)

Rating:
Summary: Unique Material makes a great book
Review: I compared this book to many othres while buying it and what impressed me the most is that this book contains a lot of unique material, which simply isn't in any other game/dev math books or any other books I've seen before for that mater. It's well explained and very diffrent than what you would expect from a math book. Strongly recommend!

Rating:
Summary: Finally understanding it
Review: I just started to learn some of theses chapters in school and this book is actually better than my prof; Seriously. The book actually builds from what it teaches; it's not just a bunch of abstract concepts which are completely seperated from one another. I've never seen matrices as vectrors of vectors for example, but it totally makes sense. I'm not yet done with this book, but the more I read, the more I dig dah thing. It's such a great feeling to actually undertsand what you do (I used to copy/pate code from the internte) without really knowing what it does. Definetely worth the price too! My coll. math books are way more expensive than that and yet way less useful; especially for games :(.

Rating:
Summary: Finally understanding it
Review: I just started to learn some of theses chapters in school and this book is actually better than my prof; Seriously. The book actually builds from what it teaches; it's not just a bunch of abstract concepts which are completely seperated from one another. I've never seen matrices as vectrors of vectors for example, but it totally makes sense. I'm not yet done with this book, but the more I read, the more I dig dah thing. It's such a great feeling to actually undertsand what you do (I used to copy/pate code from the internte) without really knowing what it does. Definetely worth the price too! My coll. math books are way more expensive than that and yet way less useful; especially for games :(.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible editing hurts a solid effort
Review: I would love to have given this five stars, but the book has too many editing gaffes for me to do it.

It's too bad, because snafus aside, the author tackles a subject --the mathematics involved in computer graphics and game programming-- that has needed a good beginner's text, and he gives the best coverage that 600 pages allows. The range of topics here could have stretched three volumes or more, but to the author's credit he never runs through important equations or derivations with some "trust me" blurb before hopping to the next stone in the river. Most formulas presented without proof are either special cases or tedious extensions of what we've already learned.

The book's writing is sharp, accesible, but not dumbed down; the mathematical rigor is fairly high, particularly for a survey text. One minor fault; some of the figures and graphs seemed a bit primitive and didn't put their intended points across as well as more elaborate diagrams could have.

Now for the bad part. The editing is poor, almost ridiculous in some parts. In the first 50 pages I counted at least five equation errors, including two pages that mentioned vector cross products using dot product notation-- a missed slam dunk in linear algebra terms. Beginners will be thrown for a loop with mistakes like that, and while they'll probably cope better with the mislabeled and duplicated diagramms, they're no fun either.

Overall, a solid effort, and if you don't mind double-checking someone else's equations then you'll glean a good deal from this. A second, corrected, edition I assume would be much more valuable, and an errata page on the web would make a *big* difference right away. If interested, Eric Lengyel's "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming" is an excellent companion to this book; it covers fewer subjects perhaps, but is more proof-oriented and doesn't have anything like this book's editing troubles.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book; Still strongly recommend despite the errors
Review: This book covers a lot of good material. Some of which you would never get to know unless you go for a math major in college. The strength of this book is that it makes this complex material accessible. The text is easy to understand and does not provide pages and pages of proofs like many other math books would likely do (at least "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics" is pretty heavy on proofs and somewhat short on examples. The chapters on collision detection, visibility, splines, numerical approximationand and space partionning are beyond excellent.

The only complain I have about this book is the mistakes that are particularly visible in the first chapters. I personally don't see that as a big deal, since the author seems pretty keen on posting all the known mistakes on the book's web site. Once/if a second edition/print of the book comes out and fixes the mistakes, it will clearly outshine all of the other ones I have read by a head and shoulder.

I strongly recommend this book despite its mistakes.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book, but...
Review: This is an exceptionally accessible text on mathematical concepts that would otherwise require years of wading through higher level college math courses. The parts of the text that are less clear on the first read-through become immediately clear when connected to later sections. The only downside is that the book is PLAGUED with errors - as many as 3 or 4 every couple of pages. Carelessly copied and pasted equations are often out of place or incorrect. Diagrams are improperly labelled. Often in the text the author says precisely the opposite of what he means. Andrew LaMothe may be a very smart man, but this book was woefully in need of a different editor before it went out the door. It actually helped me pay attention and learn since I had to constantly keep an eye out for errors, and make sense out of what the author meant, so (suprisingly!) in spite of the prevalant errors I'd recommend this book to anyone.