Great amount of information for working with Unreal scripting!

I am a beginner to Unreal scripting, and had not realized how involved it could be. This book helps you with setting up everything you need to get started, installing the UDK and external programs for script editing/compiling, and setting up a project.

The book appears to be aimed more so at beginners, with information about basic programming types, functions and states, albeit how to use them in UnrealScript. It does include some more advanced concepts, such as working with multiplayer, but it’s primary purpose is to give a good base for learning how to use UnrealScript.

Overall, it contains a ton of information on using UnrealScript, and would be useful for any looking to become very familiar with it.

You can pick up the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/unreal-development-kit-game-programming-with-unrealscript-beginners-guide/book

Great book for beginners to game programming!

The book is aimed towards beginners starting out in game programming. Visual basic is one of the easier languages to get started in, and XNA is a well known game framework, so it is an excellent place for beginners to start.

The book starts out with an introduction to XNA, and how to set it up on your machine for development. The author explains everything he adds to the code, which makes it easy to understand what each addition does.

The first game is created in chapter 2, so the author quickly gets into actually creating games fairly quickly, while introducing important concepts such as sprite sheets and tile based games.

The following games continue to introduce important concepts, from collision detection to the A* pathfinding algorithm, and even using a map editor to make levels for a side scrolling mario-esque game!

I would definitely recommend this book to beginner and intermediate game programmers. The amount of important concepts introduced in this book would give you a great start to developing more advanced games in the future, and the concepts will still be useful for any 3d games. It doesn’t matter so much what language you start out programming, just learning the game programming concepts will get you started regardless of what language you eventually choose to develop in.

You can pickup the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-xna-4–0-game-development-by-example-beginners-guide/book

Great cookbook for Cocos2d game developers, and useful for general game development.

If you’ve had some experience with development in Objective C on the iphone, and want to learn how to develop games, this is a great cookbook. The book starts with an introduction to graphics, animated sprites, and OpenGL, but delves quickly into more advanced topics, such as writing and reading using different file formats, creating an isometric game ‘engine’, integrating box2d physics, and using the A* algorithm for pathfinding.
I’ve been creating games for a few years, and did learn some good tips and techniques in this book, but some of them I had already learned through trial and error on my own.

So if you have programming experience, and have started game development in the past, or created a small game, this book could save you lots of time, learning tools needed to create full games, versus figuring it out on your own over a long period of time. If you’re already an experienced game developer, and newer to using Objective C, this book might still be useful for seeing how to translate from development on other devices to on the iphone.

You can pickup the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/cocos2d-for-iphone-1-game-development-cookbook/book

I picked up this book because I wanted to get some hands on experience using the CryEngine with a reference book, but had not used the CryEngine before.

I feel this book is more aimed towards beginners, and allows someone new to the CryEngine to be able to easily jump in, and have a reference for doing a ton of stuff that might not be very straight forward, as well as a lot of detail on using the interface.

Overall, just reading through the first chapters, I was able to get comfortable with the interface, and able to create and setup my own basic level. Further on, the book goes into a more general “cookbook” style, with recipes for doing a variety of different things you might need in your level.

The book is well written, easy to read and a beginner can pick it up without a problem. There are lots of recipes for most things you would want to do, such as: creating terrain, changing level layout, placing items, changing lighting, putting down enemies, creating assets to import into the CryEngine, creating vehicles, some game logic, creating cut scenes, and much more.

The one problem I did have with using the book with the CryEngine are that the assets have changed since the book was published, so some of the items, or textures it tells you to look for at the beginning aren’t there. You can use alternatives instead, but it would be nice if the downloadable files included them, or you could know which version of the CryEngine Sandbox was used in the book.

Overall a great book for learning how to use the CryEngine Sandbox, with lots of helpful recipes that will have you creating cool levels.

It was also very interesting frm a game developers standpoint to see the CryEngine Sandbox tool, how it was made, and what kind of things were taken into account for creating levels. It gives me better insight into how I should layout my own tools, for simpler game development projects

You can see the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/cryengine-3-cookbook/book