Don't waste your time

Reviewed by D. Robinson, 2009-10-21

I picked up this book hoping to learn a few tricks for game development in general, and with the intent of brushing up on my C/C++ since it's a bit rusty. Unfortunately, this book has very little useful information, and instead devotes 4-6 pages of screenshots on how to install every single application, library, or package it introduces. The first 100 pages or so are devoted to how to install Windows and Ubuntu; a third of the book that is, realisitically, completely wasted on anyone who would even look for a book on this subject. Each chapter has the annoying habit of presenting a 2-3 paragraph summary of what the rest of the book has just covered (as if you couldn't guess that by having just read it), and after the first two or three times, one really does not need full screenshots on how to install yet another program that is only discussed at such a high level it might as well have not been mentioned at all.

If you just want to know what libraries or tools might be out there that happen to run on both Windows and Linux, it does provide a pretty good list of those. However, it doesn't really give you any useful information on how to use them, nor does it discuss anything meaningful regarding actual game development. In short, this is the single worst book on programming/development that I have ever come across--you'd get more useful information out of a couple of Google searches than this book provides, and spend a whole lot less that way.