Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days

by André LaMothe

Book Overview

The author takes even the most complicated issues of game programming and breaks them down into understandable lessons in the familiar 21 day format. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672305623
• ISBN13: 9780672305627
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Sams
• Length: 948 Pages
• Weight: 3.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

This book is very old, but I still love it.

This is the book that inspired me to be a game programmer years back. I love this book. Its for dos, however dos is still fun. :)It may not have much use today, its still fun to read, because people who know dos programming, rox0r those who don't :P

This book is excellent!

I bought this book a while ago, but I still find it to be a very good book. Because this book covers a lof of gameprogramming topics such as: gfx, sound, ai, input, and even more. And there are also some advance topics such as multitasking, making your own ISR's, and that's very good to know. This book is great :)I would also like to recommend: "Black Art of 3D gameprogramming", and "Tricks of the gameprogramming gurus"

compiling sample code

i have had this book for a while and finally found a compiler that would compile all the sample code on the cd without errors.I found the compiler for $40.00 it's visual c++1.52 and came with another book i bought called "visual c++ now" by microsoft press.Just select ms-dos exectuable in project type and add the c code and lamothe's graphics library and your good to go. You'll get a lot more out of the book if you compile the programs in the book yourself and make modifications to the code etc. and this book covers a lot of the basics he leaves out of his newer windows game programming book.

This is THE game programming book for beginners.

A very well written, excellent examples. This book covers from 256 VGA programming, to polygon engines, interrupts, multitasking, sound, AI and much more! Be warned though, this book requires knowlege of C. If you wish to learn C I recommend "Teach yourself C in 21 days" As well as "Teach yourself advanced C in 21 days". If you read only the first book, then you wont know basics of interrupts and have a chance of understanding them les as they are explained by Andre. The CD-ROM contains many DOS shareware games including doom etc.. The downside however is that there is no compiler included and the source code is hard to compile with any other compilers than the old Microsoft Turbo C++. Another issue is that it is getting pretty old now with it's DOS 256 color 320x200 VGA programming.. However, if you are a beginner it is for you, because it covers a lot of material to get you started programming beyound dos console mode.

Very happy with the content and ease of readability

I was very pleased with this book. I also own his Tricks book, but I liked this one better. He shows you how to use double buffering, rectangles, all forms of input, sound, scrolling, multiple pages, sprites, clipping, how to write text adventures, and much, much more. I've owned other game writing books and this is the only one worth my time. I am NOT a fan of the "21 days books" mostly because you are not going to master anything in 21 days, but this book is very much different. He uses C code which is good for those of us who don't use C++. The only downside is he wrote it for Microsoft C++, and I hate Microsoft, but if you know the differences (mostly just some slight function name changes), you can make it work. His examples are clear, the source code is on the CD, and he gives plenty of comments and details. I've only read through part of his book and I love it. I don't regret the price at all. I was quite happy that Andre' also replied to my email. I've written to other authors and none of them bother with replying back to me, so the fact he actually would reply to me shows an author who values the feelings of his readers. The only thing you will need to understand this book is a foundation for C, but there are plenty of beginning C books out there. Otherwise, if you need a "from the ground up" book with plenty of examples on how to write virtually any video game, this is a great book. The biggest drawback is that it is for 2-D games, but he has two other books out for 3-D games. I am very happy with this book