games

This is a very good book for experienced game developers.

If you are looking though, for a an intro text, this is not it. This is for serious programmers.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. While it presents a wonderfully broad discussion of MMOG development and is chalk full of ideas that you can use in development, it is at the same time often incomplete. The problem is not in the desire for the sections of the book to more deeply discuss their subject matter, but more due to the fact that the sections often fail to fully describe even what they are attempting to talk about. Included source code is fairly sparse making it difficult to discern what the authors were reaching at even when he provides UML (minus complete descriptions). At least one python project fails to work at all and there is no information for corrections on the Charles River Media web site.

So, do I recommend this book? Yes. Knowing the book as I do now, I would still have purchased it, however this may be one that you want to look through somewhat carefully at a local bookstore prior to purchasing. Expect to have to expend considerable effort when developing code based on portions of the book as you will progress along merrily based on the descriptions only to hit a roadblock in the code based on an incomplete or completely missing description of a critical portion of the topic. This book is definitely for already competent developers/designers, though you should already be prior to attempting to craft a MMOG anyway.

This book will likely float between 2 and 5 stars depending on the reader.

Best of luck to all!