Linux Game Programming w/CD
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 2.55Customer Rating: 2
Summary: Lacks depth, too short, plagued by syntax errors.
Comment: This book is a good overview of what gaming libraries are out there for programming in linux and some fundamentals on getting several of those gaming libraries. But that's it...
I've found the book to be extremely lacking in depth or finished code samples. It gives snippets on how to accomplish something then leaves you hanging. Plus there are quite a bit of syntax errors in the code that can leave a beginner quite frustrated. Nothing is worse than cutting and pasting code from a book word for word and not having it compile because of poor book editing.
The author tries to cover everything from sound, to video, to AI, to networking - with several different libraries - in a 300 page book. And a good fifty of those pages are concerning the gpl and other licenses. Knowing about the GPL and about open source is great, but not when I spent money on game programming (video, sound, ai). What this results in is less than 10 pages on one particular topic.
To sum up: browse this book in the bookstore and then keep moving. Buy yourself a better C++ or OpenGL book instead. Or just go online - better information exists out there.
Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Good read, but some minor code flaws
Comment: I'm about 4 chapters into Linux Game Programming right now and so far it has been quite interesting and easy to grasp.
The problem I have encountered so far is some mildy annoying code flaws, variables that are either not initialized or change case half way through ex:
int I = 0;
...
i = 2(wow.. when did C become case insensitive?)
Also, things like calling atexit() without mentioning that you need to include stdlib.h , I'm sure a more advanced programmer would have caught that flaw immediately, but it gave me problems for several hours.
I'm in partial agreement with the other review, This is a great book, and its concepts a easy enough to grasp, but the buggy example code may give problems to those who havent programmed extensively before. If you are an intermediate newbie like me, be sure to take a look at the documentation ... and various example programs around the net.
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: It could have been better.
Comment: This book was helpful in many regards. It showed the basic idea of how to use the APIs presented. However, allow me to warn that there are many technical errors. When I went to compile and run the included code snippets _as_they_were_written_ I would run into problems like "unrecognized symbol" because of an incorrect or missing include file or a program exiting because it looked for the wrong return value from a funcition. Sloppiness like that leads me to sum up: it could have been better.