Reviews for Game Programming with Python (Charles River Media Game Development)

1. Interesting but deficient

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2004

   The idea of this book is fine. The execution is, in some respects, poor. Either the author or editor were too rushed and the result is that the ideas are not clearly expressed. I am aware of, and can cope with, the differences between US and UK English. I still expect a book to have sentences that have verbs (some do not) and that say what they intend clearly. Sometimes the sentences are so tortuous that the meaning is obscured.

   A number of the examples simply do not work on current (2.3.4) releases of Python without considerable additional effort. The author-supplied libraries need to be installed (and are mostly not compatible with 2.3.4 and later). This is not pointed out and without doing so, the examples simply don't work.

   In early examples which do work under 2.3.4, there is no explanation that the ESC key is the way out of a blank screen example! This is a trivial example, I know, but illustrates the lack of care in preparation of the book.

   You may well find useful stuff in here (I certainly did). You will have to work harder to extract that information than is reasonable because of weak or poor editing.

2. Very useful presentation of game programming topics

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2003

   This is basically a presentation of a number of general game programming concepts and libraries, and discussion of the pros and cons of using Python as the programming language for different parts of a computer game. The writing is quite clear and focused, and the author remembers to motivate his design choices. My only real problem with the book is the code on the accompanying cdrom, which will only work on Win32 systems, definitely not my favourite programming environment. However, most of the concepts discussed are valid for any platform.