Felonius: THANKS! You have been an incredible help. By path I meant the path to a good solid knowledge in game development. And my question probably should have been "In which order should I learn game development techniques if I want to gain a true knowledge of the subject." I don''t want to be just another pathetic coder who blindly copies snippets of code. Another question that occured to me was: "Generally (or from your experience) how long did it take for you to get to the: text based game; 2d shape; 2d sprite; basic 3d; 3d w/ models; basic 3d effects (shadows, lighting, fog); advanced 3d effects (blurring, cel-shading, etc..), and by ''get to the subject'' I mean get a basic & solid grasp of the topic."

BTW: With your help in mind, I went online and got one book out of each one of the subjects on your list (minus the AI, I figure I won''t be needing to get too indepth with AI coding for a while.) Hopefully they should get here in a couple days and I can begin learning in ernest. (I''m sixteen and working at a dry-cleaning drop off site that my brother owns, so I have about 6 hours at work to practice/learn the code and about 4 hours at home. God I love being a kid. )

"If the book contains a disk or a CD then it almost certainly crap"

why would u say that? i think its good that they give u source examples.

cause otherwise u end up with source examples in the book that u can neva get to work (if ur new like me). and u become lost and give up trying! ... if they give u the source file and the exe. then u can look through and figure out what u did wrong in yours.

[edit]

im using tricks of the windows game programming gurus and it came with a cd with ms vc++, paintshop, and truespace demos... which are helpfull cause he explains somewhat how to do some of the things in ms vc++ ... which if i didn't have it id be lost (dunno where to find good compilers).

also tricks is with SAMS, which u put on ur bad list... but i think tricks is a very good book, and alot of others thought that too (i was reccommended this book by people on this forum)

[/edit]

[edited by - stickman on June 7, 2002 2:08:00 AM]

I can see where you''re comming from, but I also agree w/ felonius... It''s not that the CD''s are a bad idea, it''s just that the books that generally acompany them are horrible. I''ve had that problem w/ VB, Perl, and Java books alike. Generally if a book says something along the lines of "CD-Rom included!" it usually isn''t as high of quality as others which put their entire effort into the book itself. I agree that the source examples are great, but for some reason it just seems that you can get one or the other, but not both...

On the cd included thing:
The game programming gems ( and graphics gems I believe ) contain cds and are excellent books. My favorite general c++ reference, the Deitel book has an excellent cd.
And about sams:
I used to feel they were crap when all I saw that they pulished were the "teach yourself Blah in N time" books. But they do sell some pretty good books, on which the sams logo is extremely small, almost like they know their reputation is crappy. Books like efficient c++ and some software engineering books, not to mention "tricks of the windows..." which I think is ok, I give it a B.

Well put cyssis, it is not the CD-ROMs themselves that are bad. In fact in same cases they supplement the books very well. There just seem to be a higher tendency to include a CD-ROM with a computer book if it a bad book.

BTW, I see that the publisher Wordware is on my list of Bad publishers. That is an error - it should be among the Medium Publishers.

Concerning putting SAMS on the list of bad publishers I insist on this. I know there might be exceptions (which I pointed out above) and Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus might very well be one of them but of the 6 books I have read from SAMS I consider them all crap - and this includes the original Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus also by LaMothe (it is the predessor to TotWGPG). It could just have been so much better even for its time.

Anyway, I noted that the local (the largest in Copenhagen) IT-bookstore only sells books from my bad and medium list these days and only if they are less than 2 years old. They say they can''t IT books otherwise. Somehow people must think that they are better. I am baffled. Isn''t this odd?

And again I must emphasize that the tips I provided only are tendencies. Tip 1 is probably the one that fail to be true most often and Tip 2 comes next while Tip 3 practically always are true. Very good books that that I have read that defy tip 1 and 2 are:
* Jeff Prosise: Programming Windows with MFC (Microsoft Press)
* Andrew Troelsen: Developer''s Workshop to COM &ATL 3.0 (Wordware)
so they do exist and mainly in the "medium" publisher category.
(but they should not be first books one should buy to learn game programming, mind you)

And cyssis, concerning path I don''t think there is such a clear path. Just read the books in the order you fancy (which did you order?). It can be hard to appreciate the substle details of a subject in isolation. For insteance, many C++ programming techniques can probably only be truely understood if you have already some practical experience with somewhat large projects and that you can''t get without some of the other fields too. So read a little bit of each switching among them making sure it stays fun. Read some (non-programming) theory in one book and then try to implement it thereby getting better at programming. That way you can learn programming and theory at the same time.

I am always pleased to help people that truely show a will to learn the serious way. And you seem very mature about this things for a 16 year old. I didn''t have that maturity until I was about 19. I am impressed.

>> But they do sell some pretty good books, on which the sams logo is extremely small, almost like they know their reputation is crappy. Books like efficient c++ and some software engineering books, not to mention "tricks of the windows..." which I think is ok, I give it a B.

lol. This might be true. I don''t know. I haven''t dared read any new books from them for a couple of years now. They might have improved

Hmm... Let's see. I have a book named The C Programming Language lying around. I've talked to several developers and they swear by it (I believe that it was developed for Boing engineers), so I've decided to stick with it and see how things go. As for the others, I purchased:

Foley: Computer Graphics - Principles and practice
Heines: Real-time Rendering
Game Programming Gems 1 (I figure I might as well start at the beginning, and I doubt I'll be getting to either one of these books any time soon)
Cormen: Introduction to Algorithms
Physics for Game Developers (I decided on this one because I have a VERY solid foundation in math (algebra through calc) and I think I'd rather just look at how it applies to gaming in particular.

Thanks for clearing up that learning path question. I actually prefer nonlinear learning, but it appeared to me that everybody learned completely sequentially (I was actually dreading it, now it doesn't seem so bad).

Oh, and as for local bookstores, I feel your pain... I normally live in Roswell, New Mexico (no... I haven't seen any aliens) and the general expresion when you ask for a book on programming in C/C++ is a mix between a deer caught in headlights and a hungover college freshman realizing he has a calc final in an hour... *Sigh* It's okay though... Seattle has a GREAT selection of IT books.

>>1)I am always pleased to help people that truely show a will to 2)learn the serious way. 3)And you seem very mature about this things for a 16 year old. I didn't have that maturity until I was about 19. I am impressed.

1)Trust me, I can't thank you enough for your help. I would have dumped 300 bucks into 2000 pages of crap and been furious.
2)I have found out that being thourough is a much better idea than skimming through things. Even if it does take longer...
3)Thanks for the compliment man. I'm just trying to get ready for life after highschool, and I figure that whining "It's toooo haard! Don't they just have a program for this?" isn't going to get me anywhere.

[edited by - cyssis on June 7, 2002 3:30:21 AM]

Check the Association of C/C++ Users recomended book list (see in my sig)

Documents [ GDNet | MSDN | STL | OpenGL | Formats | RTFM | Asking Smart Questions ]
C++ Stuff [ MinGW | Loki | SDL | Boost. | STLport | FLTK | ACCU Recommended Books ]

Hmm. That''s a great list! I''m gonna bookmark it and come back when I have some more cash. Thanks for the link fruny.

To bad that ACCU book list isn't ranked. Just in the category of advanced C++ there is 26 books - this makes it hard to know which to buy if I just want the essentials...

quote:
Foley: Computer Graphics - Principles and practice
Heines: Real-time Rendering
Game Programming Gems 1 (I figure I might as well start at the beginning, and I doubt I'll be getting to either one of these books any time soon)
Cormen: Introduction to Algorithms
Physics for Game Developers (I decided on this one because I have a VERY solid foundation in math (algebra through calc) and I think I'd rather just look at how it applies to gaming in particular.

Two comments:
* Concerning math. I am not 100% into the US school system but I don't think high school math is enough. When I said basic math I meant math including something like the freshman college level. I guess you know how to integrate a function. Do you know matrix algebra? vector math? predicate logic? some basic group theory? If you find Cormen is to hard you might have to return and learn more math. It is just so you know.
* I think you should buy a book that introduces one of the two main graphics technologies available, directx or opengl. That can be either Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus (for DirectX)(Inside DirectX is way outdated) - or the OpenGL Programming Guide (for opengl). It is important to keep motivation high by doing cool stuff and to have a good testbed to try theory on.
If you have to cut one of the other ones I would cut either:
-- Game Programming Gems 1 since it might be to high level for you for now for you to appreciate fully, OR
-- Heines: Real-time Rendering, since that and Foley has a lot of duplicate material so I would start with just one of those and of Heines and Foley I personally prefer Foley, but that is a matter of taste.

(if they are not dispatched yet you can still change your order)

[edited by - felonius on June 7, 2002 4:02:30 AM]