Review: Game Engine Gems 1 By Eric Lengyel

Game Engine Gems 1 By Eric Lengyel is a book I discovered on Amazon, but really hadn’t heard of or seen talked about anywhere else. I do recognize the editor, Eric Lengyel, as the creator of the C4 Engine and author of the classic textbook Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics. So I was going in with high hopes. The book is a

Review: Beginning DirectX 11 Game Programming by Allen Sherrod

Beginning DirectX 11 Game Programming by Allen Sherrod is, what I’d consider, a great introduction into DirectX programming. Just to be clear, it’s really only an overview of the DirectX APIs (Direct3D, DirectInput, etc.) and not really a graphics or game programming book (despite the title). So there is very little in the way of actual gameplay type programming, as you never really

Review: OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook by Ilya Grinblat & Alex Peterson was, I guess, what it advertised itself as; a quick cookbook of recipes using OGRE. What is was not was a good inspection of the OGRE engine itself. Really what the book amounted to was a series of short chapters, each tackling a specific programming problem. While there is nothing wrong with

Review: Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 3D Beginner’s Guide

Honestly I’m not sure why I bothered with this book. It’s not that it was a bad read per se, but it’s really for stark beginners. Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 3D by Terry Norton is really for people that have little or no experience with programming. Meaning if you don’t know what a ‘variable’ or a ‘method’ is then this book will

Review: Game Engine Design and Implementation by Alan Thorn

Alan Thorn’s Game Engine Design and Implementation was quite an interesting read. Overall I thought it was good, but the book struggles at times to find it’s audience. On one hand, it covers a lot of great topics and there are some good code snippets to be found. On the other hand, it seems to jump around between APIs and frameworks and never really

Review: More Effective C++

I decided to break from my 3D game engine book marathon and go to something more fundamental. More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers is one of those books I have  had on my wishlist for years but just hadn’t got around to reading yet.  I had read the original book  Effective C++ some years ago, and this sequel very much follows the same form. Though

Review: Getting Started with UDK

Right off the bat, I knew this was not going to be an in-depth resource. The book weighs in and a light 120 pages, though the title does say “getting started” so I least they were upfront about it. That said, I did find the book useful and feel it was a good intro text for people unfamiliar with UDK. Getting Started with

Review: Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez

Personally I hate spoilers, so I will keep this brief. Freedom™ is the sequel to the best-selling book Daemon by Daniel Suarez. If you haven’t read the original, you should go do that now. It’s great. The premise of the first book is that of a famous game developer that dies, and spawns an AI that goes rouge and starts killing people. It then follows