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J2ME Game Programming Review by Alejandro Woywood
Best way to learn J2ME + MIDP1.0
Some months ago I did an exhaustive research on books about J2ME + MIDP1.0.
(Although MIDP2.0 or Symbian is what you need to know to develop for the latest handsets, the big market out there is MIDP1.0)
Comparing reviews from this site and citations in expert forums like Nokia Forum, it was soon clear that this book was a winner.
This book is a heavy one. You will dedicate a complete month to master it. And a second month to develop your own game engine based on the one proposed in this book.
What I liked most about this book is exactly that. There are no open-source or cheap game engines for J2ME+MIDP1.0 around. You have to assemble your own! And Wells does a very good job explaining you every decision he made while developing the framework for the game presented in the book.
More precisely, the book presents two games. The first one is a Frogger clone, done in a pretty simple way...after the first chapters learning J2ME he shows you how to code a prototype of a game. But developing a real game is a much more involved task. That's he spends the next 300 pages explaining you how to develop your game in a professional way. Perfect!
The book also has chapters on marketing your game and sales aspects. It also has a brilliant chapter on isometric games and a -let's say- experimental chapter on a 3d technique known has raycasting (you probably wont use it but its very interesting to read anyway). It also has an introduction chapter to MIDP2, explaining you how some of the decisions he made in the development of the game where influenced by the migration path logic to MIDP2.
A word of warning: you will find some typographical mistakes in the book. There is even an example code at the beginning which is misplaced.
But you probably won't type anything from the book, everything you need to try the examples is located in the CD.
The book is in a way outdated. It explains how to code in a IDE like Eclipse and compile versions for the various handsets using Ants. Today we use Netbeans which does that transparently. Anyway, its good to know how is it done in the inside.
I finished reading this book 2 month ago and I still use it as reference while I'm developing games.
If you just want to know about mobile game programming, don't buy this book, it's too hard and long for you. But if you want to develop games professionally, this is the right book for you.