games

There are many game programming books out there written for beginning to intermediate programmers, but unfortunately, advanced information is harder to come by, being scattered across web sites, magazines, technical journals, and in small sections of non-game-specific books. Game Programming Gems finally provides a single place where you can find explanations of advanced techniques that are actually being used in modern games.

This book covers a broad range of topics and is written by many authors, so naturally, there will be some sections that are more useful to you than others. Overall, though, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game programmer who wouldn't benefit in some way from this book.

My only minor complaint is that although the vast majority of the chapters include sample code, not many include a complete demo. Although you can easily create your own project to dump the sample code into, it would have been nice to be able to immediate launch a demo as I read each section.

That one shortcoming isn't enough to stop me from giving this a 5 star rating. I highly recommend it to any intermediate to advanced game programmer who wants to take it to the next level.

This book is hands-down the best book yet published on game programming. I have yet to find any other book that begins to approach the excellence of Game Programming Gems in terms of the breadth and depth of the subjects covered.

GPG will serve as an excellent introduction to a broad variety of game programming techniques for those new to the industry, and an invaluable desk reference and for more experienced game developers. As a 7-year industry veteran, I can't count the number of times the techniques in this book would have proven useful in the past.

Of particular interest are Steve Rabin's excellent chapters on the A* algorithm, the cornerstone of (most) pathfinding in computer games. These chapters go far beyond the explanation of the algorithm itself and serve up a host of rare and valuable insights for getting the most out of your pathfinding in an actual game environment.

I have no doubt that this book will have a significant impact on the state of the art in the game development community, and one can only hope that this book is only a hint of what's to come.

I've found this book to be very useful in game programming. The variety of articles an concepts covered is very vast. In fact, that is probably the cause for its only (in my opinion) shortcomming - that many of the articles aren't long or complete enough. An excellent book if you're looking for an introduction to many different concepts.