Focus on Sdl [With CDROM]

by Ernest Pazera

This book will provide a perfect alternative to those who dislike DirectX or want to learn to program games using a different API. It's a perfect resource for programming games with SDL. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592000304
• ISBN13: 9781592000302
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Course Technology
• Length: 325 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good intro. to SDL if you already have C++ knowledge and a copy of VC++

It's a pretty good introduction to SDL I think. A bit misleading though being part of the 'Game Development Series' but it doesn't teach how to make a game at all. By the end of the book you'll be able to put a bmp on the screen and play a sound file. Also, the back cover says "This book teaches you how to write code and then distribute it to various platforms." Which is kind of a lie! It never explained how to distribute or even set up Mac OS X or Linux or anything besides setting it up in VC++. I mainly got this book because I want to create a game for Linux and Mac OS X and MS Windows. I had to search online and do a lot of trial and error to eventually get all the samples to compile on Linux and OS X. It never even mentions how to set up SDL on anything other than VC++. I think this might've been frustrating if you didn't know how to use VC++ and C++ pretty well and wanted to do truly cross-platform SDL code. After this book I read a couple online tutorials on SDL and am also now reading Programming Linux Games (which has to do with SDL too) and the official SDL documentation and after all that I think I'll have a decent grasp on SDL. For somebody with pretty good C++ knowledge and at least some VC++ IDE knowledge though it isn't a bad intro to SDL especially for its size. It's a very small book I read it in two days and then spent a day making sense of it all in Linux and Mac OS X besides just VC++ but I don't regret reading it.

Very good for entry level game developers.

Most books on game development today simply rehash material that is already available in countless other books. The Focus On series is a refreshing change. Though considerably thinner than the fullsize counterparts, the Focus On books dive right into the material you want to learn. This was certainly true in the case of Focus On SDL. The book gets you going immediately, setting up your compiler and getting a window on the screen. From there, you build on what has already been covered to show off various features of SDL. My biggest complaint about this book, much like one of the other reviewers, was that the book did not give much information about setting SDL up with OpenGL. The information available on the internet is very good and will allow you to fill in any missing pieces of the book, but if you're like me and would like a physical book to thumb through rather than a web reference, this book is perfect.

Good beginner's book, but brief.

On the positive side, this book is an excellent entry-level programmer's guide to the SDL library. Anybody with basic coding skills should be able to easily follow the examples (which, by the way, are not duplicated in print... something to keep in mind if you are reading this on the train). Surely you could learn all you need to from SDL's own web site and other online documentation. But if you prefer to sit down and read a book cover to cover, like I do, this book might be a better fit.My biggest disappointment is that there is no coverage of OpenGL at all. My attraction to SDL is to use as a base platform for OpenGL coding. A chapter on OpenGL integration would have won a fifth star from me.I would like to have seen more advanced and in-depth coverage. Maybe another chapter or so on implementing an example game using the framework given to us in the final section.

Good tutorial

Focus on SDL is Ernest Pazera's fourth programming tutorial and the third one written for Premier Press. With every effort, both Mr. Pazera and Premier are getting closer to putting together an ideal set of game development tutorials. Pazera's books get more organized while Premier focuses and deflates the fat from their efforts. Focus on SDL is about all I could hope for from an SDL tutorial. It's not perfect, but it does a great job of doing what it sets out to do.First off, let me say something about SDL -SDL is easy! While it's got a couple of quirks here and there, SDL is a very well organized and very easy to learn library for games. And Focus on SDL realizes this. It doesn't try to make a simple subject complicated by ignoring the big picture to focus on minutiae. The main tutorial starts out logically with a discussion of starting up and shutting down SDL, followed by creating your main window, followed by placing bitmaps on the window, followed by event-handling, followed by playing CD-audio and video, followed by the joystick, and finally finished by threads and timers. In other words, it goes in about the order you'd need to go to write a simple game. Go figure.If you haven't figured out yet, this is a good book for beginners. It takes an easy-to-learn library and makes it even easier to learn. There aren't any code-listings for the obligatory breakout-clone in the text, but by the time you get to page 150, you should have no problem figuring out how to structure a game from what you've read.The next 75-odd pages of Focus on SDL are focused on the most important SDL add-on libraries. If you go to the SDL website, you'll see that there are literally dozens of add-on libraries available that cover everything from sprite graphics to GUI libraries. Focus on SDL covers the four libraries that I would have chosen as the most important components that are not part of core SDL, namely SDL_image (loading common bitmap file formats), SDL_ttf (loading and displaying TrueType fonts), SDL_net (networking), and SDL_mixer (loading, mixing, and playing sounds). As you can imagine, a complete game would likely need most, if not all, of these add-ons, so it's good to have those covered.The remainder of Focus on SDL covers a C++ wrapper-library for SDL. SDL lends itself very nicely for abstracting with objects, so constructing a wrapper that abstracts all of the primitive SDL bits like colors, palettes, rectangles, etc. is certainly a good idea.One thing I'd like to commend the author for is waiting to write the class-library until the end of the book. I've read so many books that spend all of chapter 2 constructing a comprehensive class library wrapping the subject technology, then using the rest of the book teaching you how to use the class-library rather than the technology itself. That means that if I want to know how to use a particular call, I can't just look up the call in the book. I have to look at the author's wrapper-function and figure out ho