Reviews for iPhone Games Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

1. Hopeless, Do not buy

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, October 12th, 2009

   Unfortunately, there were no reviews for this book when I bought it as I pre-ordered it. I really regret buying it as it has nothing remotely helpful if you want to develop a game on the Iphone. I have many years programming experience and grew up developing on the Amiga so have a good idea of the information required to start on a new platform. This book doesn't contain anything like the information required and the title is extremely misleading.
   If you want to develop games, get an OpenGL ES book and use the XCode templates as they will stand you in far better stead.

2. Not all of those are gems...

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2009

   I join the previous reviewers in their disappointment, but the most amazing thing about this book is that the material written by the book's Lead Author PJ Cabrera is such a terrible mess. First of all, the topic is barely relevant for games development, but ok, web services can be used for anything. Then PJ throws in some snippets of Rails that are incomprehensible for those who doesn't know Rails and trivial for those who does. Why were they needed at all? But then we are coming to iPhone development, finally, and this is where I am beginning to feel a doubt in the author's overall competence. He is using a UITableViewController and creates an outlet for UITableView in it... Hey, look at your own screenshot on page 35 and you will see that this controller already has a table view connected to an outlet.
   
   I gave this book two stars because I hope it will become more useful for me after I learn more about Open GL from some other source. Otherwise, I would give it just one star. I wonder if Dave Mark whose name is on the cover has ever looked into the book.

3. Poor

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2009

   After the excellence of Beginning iPhone Development, this book was a huge disappointment. There are some useful nuggets of information but the book is just not comprehensive enough. When it arrived I was shocked by the lack of pages. For a book costing £20 + you might have a right to expect more content.
   
   You can probably learn most of what is in the book by reading free resources on the web. I wanted this book to be great, but it isn't and I haven't returned to it since the first reading.

4. Not what I had hoped for

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2009

   This is the third book I have bought in the Apress series. I can heartily recommend the "Learn Objective C on Mac" and the "iPhone Development" books, which were well laid-out, split into easy to digest chapters and seemed like fairly complete guides to their chosen topics.
   
   Maybe I was expecting too much from this book from it's vague description on Amazon, but it is best approached like the "Game Programming Gems" books rather than a comprehensive guide to iPhone Games/OpenGL-ES programming, which is what I (and I suspect most people) actually want.
   
   The book is split into chapters, each of which has been written by a different author, all of which are well written, but two of which are purely about game design with no code included at all, and the others skim over fundamental details.
   
   And when I say skim, the authors may say "it gets you interested in an idea and sets you off on your own path to discovery", which is suppose is a fair comment, or it would be if there wasn't already so much to learn before it is possible to create an iPhone game, none of which is really covered here. I found myself happily reading through the chapters, and getting to the end realising I hadn't really learnt anything except that "concept X or Y" was actually possible, but not actually how to do a proper job of it.
   
   As an experienced gameplay programmer (C++ on the main consoles), I want to get into iPhone games development, but the lack of information anywhere about OpenGL-ES (including, disappointingly, in this book) leads me to conclude that the only way forward is to use an existing engine, such as Unity, or one of the free ones.
   
   In summary, an easy to read book with some useful ideas, and some things I didn't realise were possible, but at 250(ish) pages, far too short and too bitty to really be of much use.
   
   Let the author of chapter 3 write a whole book about OpenGL-ES game programming (including 3D for pity's sake) and maybe I'll be a bit happier.