programming

Torque badly needs a book like this, but I hope some of the faults in this work are addressed in a second edition.

First, the good stuff. There is no book to offer a holistic overview of the mighty Torque Game Engine. This book has broken that sad deficiency. The author also writes at a level that will not alienate the experts overly as it offers the neophtes a leg up. The text is playful and fun, but not caked in silliness as I've found similar volumes seeking the same touch. As such, it is a true invitation to explore and learn how to use a complex and capable game engine that has suffered from a "by coders, for coders" darkness in the documentation department for years.

However, as I work through the book, I find a considerable number of errors in the text/code and comments of the sample scripts in the book. There is a threaded post or two on the www.garagegames.com forums where Ken is patiently noting corrections offered by the enthusiastic readers, but one cannot help but feel that the barriers these mistakes will present true newbies are more considerable.

The CD ROM is a misfire, in my opinion. One of Torque's greatest advantages over other game engines is that it support Linux and Mac in addition to Windows machines. But the CD ROM has setup.exe's and such whose function is nothing more involved that to extract compressed data from the CD and place it on your hard disk. This is just a sad mistake which alienates the subset of his audience who would most keenly benefit from having good documentation for such a gem as Torque in that they have so many fewer choices available to them. I strongly urge the publisher to replace such executable archives with plain ZIP files... at least for those containing only chapter "RESOURCES" materials. This would allow Torque to reach its greatest possible audience and put all platforms on a more even footing.

I look forward to finishing the book and walking through its lessons, but the CD ROM has failed to expedite my quest.

I've just got and read most of this book and I'll try to give my personal opinions, but from what I hope it could be a somewhat objective point of view. For starters, I can say book is really well written, but still, I'm just giving it book 3 stars, just becouse I was actually expecting something more from it, and the book title was a little misleading to me...

PROS:
Well Written
Comprehensive
Written for Beginners

CONS:
Too Specific to the Torque Game Engine (the word Torque is actually repeated infinitely through the book).
DirectX and OpenGL aren't sufficiently covered (just hint at).
For REAL Beginners (even teaches you how to use Paint Shop Pro)
Doesn't go into mid-low levels (no C++ code, hardware issues, etc)
A bit repetitive sometimes

OVERALL:
As the heading says, calling it 3D Game Programming All in One is maybe a bit misleading, whereas "Creating Games From Scratch w/ the Torque Engine" could have been a more suitable title.
Anyways, the book is very well written, so go ahead and get it if you're a real beginner and you're intrested in learning how to make a game from scratch, just from the designer (not programmer) point of view. You'll be taught some TORQUE, Paint Shop Pro, Ultraedit 32, Milkshape and other tools/game design issues, to make a complete game, at the end; a bit of everything is covered, really.
It's probably not the book for you though, if you know something about programming already and especially if you expect to learn (like I did) some gaming 3D math issues and some "mid level" development stuff (like C++, DirectX, OpenGL).

If you are aspiring to learn TGE, the Torque Game Engine from http://garagegames.com, then buy this book right this moment! It's well written, and covers the most awesome game development tool there is: Torque.

My only gripe is that it's super-specialized to the particular tools on the CD. For example there is 14 pages on "Ultraedit 32", a Windows programmer's editor. And Milkshape is used instead of Blender for character modeling. But, OTO that's one of the nice aspects of the book it's "All in One". Like the swiss-army-knife of game development.