Hi, I have recently bought the book Multiplayer Game Programming and have a few things to say about it. I am a quite experienced programmer and bought it to learn a few things about muliplayer game programming. What I say is my oppinion, your flames are welcomed. Already in the middle of chapter two, I got a bad feeling about the book when I saw this table: 8 bits 256 colors, one byte of memory 16 bits 65536 colors, two bytes of memory 24 bits 16 million colors, 4 bytes of memory 32 bits 16 million colors, 5 bytes of memory I went on reading as I thought it was a typo. As all of you know (or?) 24 bits is 3 bytes, and 32 bits is 4 bytes. However this was NOT a typo. Todd Baron actually THINKS this is true. He continues by calculating the memory required to store a 24 bit bitmap: 800x600 24 bit => 800 * 600 * 4 = 1920000 bytes No comments. He continues by stating a few things that really tells me how BAD he knows the basic stuff about computers and programming. First of all he keeps all his member variables _PUBLIC_ in all the classes he makes. This is so bad I have no words for it. More goodies: 1. "HTTP requests come in on port 40" bah. 2. "So, you can see, there will be no shortage in IP addresses to go around for a long time." Wake up? He is actually talking about IPv4. Not v6. This book is printed 2001 too. One year ago. The shortage of ip numbers had been known for quite some time back then. (we are still only at the first 70 ages in the book, with a nice 10 pages about him luring people to open his booby-trapped chests in EverQyest) 3. This is a bit of code from his socket code: // Server listens on port 6000 ServerSocketObject.Bind( 6000 ); // Server waits for a connection request ServerSocketObject.Listen(); /// Server has received a connection request; now it accepts it ServerSocketObject.Accept( ClientSocketObject ); For all of you, these calls corresponds to the winsock equivalents. After a listen call, NO CONNECTION HAS BEEN RECIEVED. Fine. It merely tells the socket to listen for connection. 4. "I do this becuase TCP/IP is by far the most popular protocol for developing games..." has anyone here read "The internet sucks: Or, What I learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter" by Peter Lincroft? (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990903/lincroft_01.htm) You have to do that. "Lesson two: TCP is evil. Don’t use TCP for a game." And I just bought a book about Multiplayer Game programming. Oh the irony. 5. If all duplicated code is removed from the book, I would say only 80% of it remains. He pasted 3 pages long code. Explained it. Then he pasted the same code again, with 10 new lines of code in bold, and exaplained the new pieces. It turns up to have taken up 20 pages of code, instead of 4. Now I can''t hold on anymore: Obviously, Todd Barron is full of shit. He releases books to a needing community containing only shit and a copy of MSDN, together with his EverQuest rampages (OK that wasn''t needed). REMEBER: André LaMothe''s name is on the book. So, André LaMothe also tries to connect to webpages on port 40. *burp* ''nuff said, as Todd Barron wrote when he couldn''t explain how big a "long" (datatype) is on different arch''s. True. zilch_

Surprising I really enjoy that book.

Not for the Programming part but rather for the excellent tutorial on Win32 apps it gave me I was confused on how to setup buttons, listboxes, and such until I read this book.

The network coding was a great cruch and simplified things to help understand how the Code was working. But when I tried to make it work for my own programs I found that just gutting it up and learning raw WinSock really helped me. Which is what I assume Mr.Baron wanted from his SocketObject class, something as a learning tool.

BTW. Todd Baron aka Lost Logic is a great guy, I''ve chatted with him a few on Anarchy Online.

Overall I liked the book and it helped me learn, I wasnt a network master by the end but I knew enough to start, which is what these books are suppose to do anyway isn''t it?

I had bought openGL game programming, a book which I consider to be superb. So I figured that a book from the same series would be of similarly high quality. I was wrong. I also disliked this book (and it was $60 too).

It''s not the best compter/programming book i''ve ever bought, but main;y i say that because i was expecting something a bit more advanced. If i disregard all the sockets part of the book, found the Directx and win32 sections quite good. If i had got this book 3 years ago when i was new to programming i wouldv''e been much happier with it.
I think if you continue reading the book, things get a little better after the sockets section.
Onto your points.
1., 2. Fair enough
3. I''m not quite sure what your problem is here. If i remember his socketobject class, that code is fine.
4. TCP/IP IS the most popular protocol suite for games I think he is a bit muddled sometimes, because he may mean TCP here...he may not?!?! can''t remember. But i would assume he considered the handling of UDP out of the scope. IMO it seems the real meat of the book is in the directx sections, and the winsock section was "tacked on". Not happy about it, but what can you do. (and btw, i have read that particular article )
5. He actually stops doing this in later sections, he lists the complete code once (taking 4-5 pages) and then any changes he lists seperately, or not at all (you can view them on the cd instead.)

If you are truly unhappy, many bookstores will offer you store credit etc. if you return a book within a certain time period after purchase...