Reviews for iPhone Game Development: Developing 2D & 3D games in Objective-C

1. Disappointing Cash-In

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, March 12st, 2010

   Hey, iPhone game development is going to be huge! Let's get a book out, quick!
   
   Oh, but no need to put much detail in there. Why not just say stuff like "Sprite-based games need collision detection routines, so you better write some", and don't bother to tell us how.
   
   Running at 230 pages, it's an unbelievably slim volume. Very poor value.

2. In agreement with first reviewer

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, March 12nd, 2010

   I am an experienced developer and I am used to coding in various other Object Orientated languages including C# and AS3. Initially I started to read this book whilst on holiday without a computer. The concepts the authors introduce early on make complete sense and I was excited to start to code them on my return, however when I came to sit down in front of my machine and actually start to code, I realised that the developers are not such great writers. Code examples have many mistakes and lots of assumptions are made leading to a lot of confusion.
   
   I became increasingly frustrated by the lack of explanations and coherence and further more, the book does not flow very well, often asking you to code a great deal without stopping to compile, run and digest what you have created so far.
   
   Conceptually this book has some great stuff if (like me) you are new to game development, however this is as far as it goes for me and I have given up after yet another example failed to compile.

3. Not for novice iPhone developers or those new to game development

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, February 12nd, 2010

   I am an experienced developer but am completely new to iPhone development and haven't built a game in over 20 years, so I was really looking forward to creating games for the iPhone and this book seemed the best of those available at the time. I gleaned a lot of useful information on game development theory and best practices for the iPhone and there is no doubt that the authors know their stuff; however, there are several drawbacks.
   
   The authors ask you to download the sample code skeleton projects, after which you fill in the gaps using the code samples from the book itself, the only problem is the book is full of typos and mistakes. To compensate for this, the downloaded code for each chapter has an extensive "readme" file listing all of the mistakes in the book and how to fix them. This was really frustrating for me, could be hard to follow and eventually put me off building the sample projects completely.
   
   Also, the book concentrates solely on OpenGL ES for both 2D and 3D games. Whilst I'm sure this is the right approach for an experienced iPhone/OpenGL developer, it doesn't help beginners. I feel it would have been better to start with simple 2D games using Core Animation and then move on from there, because OpenGL ES is a complicated topic in itself and certainly steepens the learning curve.
   
   In summary, this book has lots of useful information on game development that could be transferred to any platform, but it is a struggle to get the code samples working and shouldn't really be considered if you are new to iPhone/game development.
   
   I give the book three stars purely on the amount of useful game theory I learned that I can use elsewhere.