Programming games for Android

Author - Mario Tsehner
Translation - Yegor Sidorovich, Evgeny Zaznoba
Release date - 10/17/2012

Announcement adapted by review .

Any new Android developer, determined to create a new game that does not yield to the popularity of the famous Angry Birds, will enthusiastically accept the release of this book. But will it suit you? I offer my review of this work. I hope readers will be able to judge how best to study it, and for whom it is best suited.
')

I looked forward to the release of this book. I like to study specific aspects of programming on this platform, so I myself manage to better present the material. The book, which will be discussed here, has undoubted advantages, but, I will not hide, not everything in it pleased me.

I'll start with the unpleasant - to end on a positive note. First, Mario Tsehner does not teach programming from scratch, and the title of the book clearly states: “Beginning Android Games”. Apparently, the author believed that readers should somehow understand the Java language (but we all know how unreliable such assumptions are). Anyway, the book does not explain exactly any basic concepts of the Java language, the development structure is overlooked. In addition, I didn’t like the excessive meticulousness of the author when examining some of the topics (in my opinion, minor) and, on the contrary, the insufficient disclosure of other topics that, just, seemed to me important. But this, as they say, is a matter of taste. In fact, these two drawbacks will not cause you much inconvenience if you are well versed in Java programming.

And now let's talk about the good. This book has a whole bunch of merit, and the author really did not spare the energy to create this 650-page masterpiece. He first talks about building a framework that is used throughout the book. As far as I remember, this is discussed in Chapter 3 - and, quite vaguely, as it seemed to me. But in the next, fourth chapter, the author proceeds to consider some of the functions of Android, which he is going to use when writing the games themselves. Further, in the fifth chapter, he links the material of the third and fourth chapter - as a result, we gain a holistic view of our framework for Android. Again, if the reader is not well versed in Java programming, then this integration may seem complicated to him. But, as it seems to me, chapter 4 will be interesting for any specialist. The author describes the development of several 2D-games (for example, a game like "snake", and later on the book - a few more two-dimensional games). Then the author talks about OpenGL (this information, I believe, will be very useful for almost anyone), but it never comes to complex programming of 3D games. True, I believe that the above material is quite enough for you to write a game like “Droid Invaders” - just what you expect to meet in such a book. 3D-programming is devoted to 3 chapters of this book. As an introduction to three-dimensional graphics - not bad, but everything is limited to introduction. In particular, here we consider the basic concepts, the concept of the on-screen model and the very basics of collision detection when programming three-dimensional graphics. I think that the author coped with these questions quite adequately, since the programming of 3D games is a very difficult topic. Thanks to the author for such a competent presentation of its foundations.

Of course, you will not become an ace of game development by reading this book. But you can explore a number of basic aspects of such development. I think the book is extremely well-submitted fundamental information on this topic. At least, better than in other books on the development of games for Android, which are now available. I can not put the book the highest rating, because it is not sufficiently discussed the language of Java. But, for that matter, this is a book about Android, not about Java. If you are just starting to do programming, I recommend to start by learning a good book about Java - and then move on to this.

In this book, the author creates some very interesting applications. Therefore, I recommend downloading the source code for the book in order to get an idea about what is being discussed. The code is here .

Hope this review was interesting to you.

Content:
Introduction
Chapter 1. Android: new in class
Chapter 2. First Steps with Android SDK
Chapter 3. Game Development 101
Chapter 4. Android for game developers
Chapter 5. Android Game Development Framework
Chapter 6. "Mr. Nome" conquers Android
Chapter 7. OpenGL ES: First View
Chapter 8. Tricks when developing 2D games
Chapter 9. “Big Jumper”: a two-dimensional game written with OpenGL ES
Chapter 10. OpenGL ES: Let's 3D
Chapter 11. Tricks in the development of 3D-games
Chapter 12. Droid Invaders: The Big Final
Chapter 13. Publish Your Game
Chapter 14. What's Next?

Book on piter.com
Book on ozone.ru