Not bad.. but could be much better!

This book assumes that you know some Java, and thus does not waste any space on Java basics. This is good for those of us that don't like buying a book on a specific subject and then skipping a third of it because it's all basic stuff that you could learn from other books anyway. Other good points about this book include that it offers good coverage of the important issues faced when writing a game. They are not afraid of getting into the important details. Often, as you are reading, you think of a "what if?" question in your head, and hey- the next paragraph starts with the same "what if?" question, then answers it.

What I did not like about this book is that the code is indeed very sloppy. At first I thought I was being picky, but others have observed the same thing. The code could have used a much cleaner design. I was one of the unfortunates who got a bad CD-ROM, and even if you painstakingly install all the files yourself and rename every single one of them (because they are stored in 8.3 format), the structure is still sloppy. The framework is re-copied in multiple directories- shouldn't a framework be in one central place and re-used by all of the concrete code? Worse: each copy of the framework is inconsistent. Many hours are lost trying to fix all of these problems.

A final note: the prose is filled with little jokes, which you may or may not like; some people think this lightens up text, but I feel that too many can become annoying. This combined with poor code and an un-tested CD-ROM makes you feel that the product lacks professionalism.

Other Reviews

• The Review
• Not bad.. but could be much better!
• Just plain terrible
• Good, but buggy starting point for writting Java game