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Programming Linux Games Review by P. S. Bunn
Good into to SDL and Game Scripting. Horrible otherwise
The book starts off ok with a good introduction of the various API's and is ok reading up untill chapter 6 "Programming Linux Audio". This is where the book fails terribly. None of the audio samples will compile and the information about OpenAL is just plain wrong. First the function used to open a WAV file is no the corerct function to use for linux. The author uses the win32 version. This is just the start of the openAL errors. Minus one star!
Second the book's two websites (one of which no longer exists (Loki) ) contains no errata and no way to contact the author. The only information is avalible is a zip file of the books sample files (which do not compile of course). Minus two stars!
Ohter things about the book that did not work for me was the fact that the author uses C instead of C++. While C is still used for game development , most programmers are attempting to migrate to C++ and OOD. Books released about 1950 should reflect that!
Second the author uses Tcl as a game scripting engine. While I can agree to a point (based on the fact of the easy of implementation) the author should have used a common scripting engine such as Lua. (although the author does mention at the end of the book that Tcl was proably a bad idea.
Third the author should have introduced Autoconf very early in the book instead of waiting untill Chapter 10.
The main thing that I liked about the book was the good intro to programming with Linux in general. The topics of linux debugging and Makefiles I thought was good (assuming you have experince in these areas on other platfoms).
Also the coverage of SDL was a pretty good intro.