game development pro
Jeremy Birn’s Digital Lighting and Rendering is a masterful treatise on digital lighting and, in my opinion, a must have on your bookshelf if you’re a 3d artist. While the text is clearly aimed at pre-rendered art, for example in animated movies or live-action effects, most of the concepts are fundamental enough to apply to lighting real-time scenes in games, or even more traditional art
I’ll cut to the chase: this book is one of the best introductions I’ve seen to the C++ language. I’ve read probably at least a dozen C++ books and I would say this would be the best place to start if you’ve never used C++ or even as your first programming book. There are some great C++ resources out there, but much of
Although the Vulkan API has been available for about a year now, it was just at the tail end of 2016 that we started to see books published on the topic. For me personally, I prefer learning from books over just reading documentation, and Vulkan Programming Guide is a fine effort. At 480 pages, it is a comfortable length, and manages to hit on
Learning Vulkan by Parminder Singh is an excellent foray into the Vulkan graphics API and quite a competent book. The text is a reasonable 466 pages, and packs a lot in there. Singh covers all the basics of using Vulkan and goes into great detail at each step of the way. Not only is there actual C++ code shown (a lot of it), but he
Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes is a short, no-nonsense, introduction to the Vulkan graphics API. Though the title of the book says “20 minutes,” I believe I spent somewhere between 1 and 2 hours to finish it (though I admittedly read pretty slow). This is the type of book I wish there were more of: something short and sweet as a brief
Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications by James M. Van Verth and Lars M. Bishop is a quality math book if I ever saw one. Strangely, the first edition came out in 2004 but the book was kind of off my radar until recently. This third edition was published in 2015 and seems very current. The authors here do a great job
Beginning Math and Physics for Game Programmers by Wendy Stahler is the kind of book I like. The title is straight-forward, and the content actually delivers what it claims. I’ve read a number of game development math books but I find that many of them expect a college level mathematics background, or at least some intermediate knowledge already. Not here. This is a
I’ve always been a big fan of Eric Lengyel, from both his work on the C4 Engine (and now the new Tombstone Engine) and his previous math book, Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, which is on it’s 3rd edition and is one of the definitive texts in the genre. This latest book, Foundations of Game Engine Development, Volume 1: Mathematics, I feel does
This book was quite an interesting read. Though a book of math and physics sounds like it would be boring, I found the text to be pretty engaging. At 688 pages, it’s not the longest technical resource, but the authors manage to pack a good deal in those pages. Of course, there is a lot of math in here, but that’s not all. Even
Game Programming Algorithms and Techniques is one of those books that tries to be as general as possible, and I believe the author was successful in that. Too many books target one specific piece of software or even one particular version of a framework and end up becoming dated rather quick. However, the core ideas in game development have not fundamentally changed in
