Right on target, but could be a little better

I purchased this book for my 13 year old son who wants to learn how to write his own games. This book is definitely right on target for the budding game-writer. The development environment, BlitzMax, is offered with this book on a trial basis. Purchasing the full program was not terribly expensive and it works on both PCs, Mac, and Linux. As a note, the Mac demo did not work well for me until I purchased it and upgraded it to the latest version. I did not have any trouble with the PC demo and did not try the Linux version. The programming language, BlitzBasic is what I would call a very "loose" programming language - it's not very strict syntactically. You can easily mistype a variable name and not notice the problem. This can make for some difficult debugging for a beginner. But given that, my son was able to write his own rudimentary games quite quickly (and he's not even half-way through the book).

My two primary complaints are (1) that the author seems to have moved on to other things and his website does not provide any support for this book as is promised in the book itself and (2) it would have been nice if the book provided some suggested exercises to reinforce concepts. I ended up making up "homework" for my son, which he promptly ignored anyway!

My secondary complaint is that some concepts could be better explained. For example, the concept of a variable can be quite confusing if you've never heard of such a thing before. It definitely helps to have at least one programmer in the house to help explain some of the more difficult concepts.

Overall, the book is perfectly targeted for the budding game-developer. My son thinks the book is very funny and despite my own complaints / concerns about the book, he's making incredible progress on his own with only a little help from his mom. So it can't be all bad!

Other Reviews

• Pretty bad
• Right on target, but could be a little better
• Software immediately expired
• Excellent book!!!
• Awesome for beginners