The Game Developer’s Bookshelf

by George on Jul.23, 2010, under Coding, Reviews

Me: “Hi, my name’s George”

Everyone: “Hi George!”

Me: “My name’s George, and I’m a book addict. I love reading and I just can’t get enough.”

Yep, I’m a book nerd, a big one. And from discussions with my fellow iDevBlogADay-ers, I’m not the only one. While the Internet is a great place to find a wealth of information, sometimes a book is the only place you can really cover a subject with the attention it deserves. I have a few favourites, and after reading this week’s post from Markus, I felt I should share.

Obtaining a Fix

Obviously, there’s the standard sources for good books – Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders. But here’s a couple of options I prefer that you might not know of. O’Reilly have an online subscription service called Safari. Depending on your subscription, you get 5 or more books that you can have complete access to at any one time. There’s a large selection of publishers, all making their books available in an online form. Often books are available here before publication in a ‘beta’ form, which is great in a fast moving industry like ours.

Another one you may not have heard of is The Pragmatic Bookshelf – who publish a range of books including a growing range of iOS related titles. What’s really cool is that they offer books in both electronic and paper forms, and at any time you can log in and re-download a copy of any book you’ve purchased through them, in PDF, ePub or mobi formats. Once again, ‘beta’ versions of books are available. The place is also run by Gerbils, which is unusual these days.

The Pragmatic guys frequently run special promotions, and it’s quite common to get up to 50% off many titles. In particular if you sign up and then recommend a friend to sign up, you’ll both immediately get 40% off coupons to redeem on any purchase. If you don’t have any friends who are sufficiently book-nerdy like you and me, drop me a line at george.sealy ‘at’ gmail.com and I’ll send you an invite so we can both enjoy a discount

Some Great Books

OK, enough prattle. Here’s a small selection of great books that I own and would happily recommend to anyone.

The Art of Game Design : A Book of Lenses

by Jesse Schell

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you want to learn how games are designed, and how to make great games yourself, then this is the book for you. Throughout the book, Jesse provides a collection of lenses. Each lens captures one aspect of game design and provides a series of questions you can ask yourself about a game. Typically the answers to these question provid insight into why certain aspects of a game aren’t working, and what can be done to improve it.

In the spirit of try before you buy, there are several chapters available on line for you to read. Or read this review.

Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche

If you’re new to iOS programming, this book will quickly become your best friend. The book is well written and introduces XCode, Interface Builder and the iPhone SDK in a clear and useful way. Many books give you an exact sequence of steps to follow to achieve a particular result, leaving you unsure how to do anything else. This book though gives you enough understanding to branch out and try things on your own. This book is often sitting on my desk when I’m working on iOS projects. This book is also available on Safari, along with many of the other good Apress iOS books.

User Interface Design for Programmers

by Joel Spolsky

I found this book before I’d ever heard of Joel Spolsky, and his test, which changed the way I go about software development. In this book he describes his no nonsense approach to UI design. The chapter names alone convey a wealth of information, for example Design for Extremes and People Can’t Read. If you haven’t heard of Joel yet, set aside a few hours and head on over to his site and start working through some of his reading lists of articles, which includes most of the content from the book, so there’s no excuse for not reading this.

Game Engine Architecture

by Jason Gregory

Jason Gregory is an industry veteran, and it shows. If you have any interest in how a game engine is put together then you’ll like this one. You’ll get a high level view of all the parts that make up an engine and how they interact along with specific examples from well known game engines – including the open source OGRE and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted engine. While the book is based on Jason’s experience with PC and PS3 platforms, there’s plenty of valuable insight here that can be applied anywhere. This book is particularly good if you are new to game programming – the older hands will probably find a lot that’s familiar – along with a few ideas that are new and useful.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

by Andrew Hunt

If there is a trend in my book choices, it is for clear, easy to read books. The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those books that can be flicked through and read a section at a time. It distills the experience and insight of the author into bite-sized chunks of wisdom that can help you be a better programmer. This book isn’t so much about programming as it is about how you as a programmer approach your work, and how you can be more efficient and effective. If I ever have enough money to employ people, this book will be required reading for all programmers.

My Name is George

I’m an addict, but it’s a reasonably harmless addiction that I’m willing to share. All of these books have a permanent place on my office bookshelf. What are your favourites? Let me know in the comments below, I’m always looking for my next fix!

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Tuning Your Game Made Easy

:Books, Programming

7 Comments for this entry

Miguel Á Friginal
July 23rd, 2010 on 5:32 pm
OK, I will bite But will only list two that are coming pretty handy lately and one that is not about programming.

First, “Real-Time Rendering” by Akenine-Möller et all, a must-have for anybody working on game graphics. Covers all the basics and 3rd edition is pretty up-to-date with the latest techniques: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568814240

Second, “Real-Time Collision Detection” by Christer Ericson. The Spatial Partitioning section only is already worth the price of the whole book. Any game programmer wanting to implement its own optimized collision code will find invaluable the depth of the many techniques discussed: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607323

Finally, and since I wrote recently about going out of the video-game realm to find inspiration for your games, “Hobby Games, the 100 Best”, edited by James Lowder. This is a compilation of 100 reviews written by game designers about the board games, card games, and role-playing games they love. After reading this book you get a completely new appreciation for both the games and the designers, plus the best advice for shopping tabletop games you can get: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1932442960

Reply
- George
  July 24th, 2010 on 10:03 am
  Thanks for the comments guys. I think I’ve just added a few new books to my wish list
  
  @Miguel – RTR almost made it onto the list, but I was running short of time to post (you slavemaster!). I bought the first edition and it’s great. It’s nice that the web site is up to date with lots of interesting info too. I’ll have to look into the collision detection book, sounds useful.
  
  @Erick – A 4-hour work week sounds handy Is it based around setting a business up in your spare time? I’ll look into it.
  
  @Markus – That’s an interesting comment about “Beginning iPhone 3 Development”. I found it an ideal starter. Possibly you’ve identified a flaw though, in that it (by necessity) covers Obj-C very lightly. I’ve tended to avoid Obj-C as much as possible, favouring C++ code for most of my logic, so I haven’t had too much trouble. Does the Kochan book cover Mac development at all? Or is it a ‘pure’ Obj-C book?
  
  Reply
Erick Garayblas
July 24th, 2010 on 12:05 am
I’m a bookworm too and I will definitely check out your recommendations, thanks! I must admit that I’m more of a business book lover though and here are my contributions: The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (great for indie devs and people who are struggling between a day-job and indie work) and Web Copy That Sells by Maria Veloso (if you’re serious into app marketing and need help creating your app descriptions, product pages and press releases).

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Markus Nigrin
July 24th, 2010 on 9:07 am
Love your list!
Just starting to develop for the iPhone myself and starting with “Beginning iPhone 3 Development” (and somewhat struggling with it), I found that “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ by Stephen Kochan was a better beginners book for me.
I find it really hard to explain why, but style, pace, build-up and the examples used made it just more straightforward for me to read and understand. This is probably a very personal choice so I recommend using Amazon’s preview function to find what you might like better. And if you are only looking for a second book to complement “Beginning iPhone 3…”, then definitely check out Kochan’s book.

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Markus Nigrin
July 24th, 2010 on 2:00 pm
@George that might actually be the point. I had no experience with C/C++ going into this (believe it or not. I was always a Delphi for Windows guy) so the basic language introduction of the Kochan book was very helpful to me. It has chapters on writing iPhone apps and getting you started, so that was not a problem.
I saw incidentally today that there is a 2nd edition available now and one of the reviewers stated that he read “Beginning iPhone 3…” and then the Kochan book and should have done it the other way around. That’s exactly what I would recommend, it’s a complex start and both books really complement each other.

Reply
- George
  July 24th, 2010 on 4:17 pm
  That makes a lot of sense. I had a few months working with Cocoa when it first came out, and have worked with more languages than I care to remember, so I forget what a speed bump a new language can be. The good news is that both books are available on Safari, which is a great resource when you’re tackling a new technology.
  
  Reply
Tom Ortega
July 25th, 2010 on 4:48 am
I have to agree 100% on Jesse’s book. Just his writing style alone is worth the price of the book. The fact that it’s amazing content makes it that much better.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. Someday, Jesse and I are gonna sit down for lunch and become great friends. Two birds of a feather gotta flock together someday. LOL

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