Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner (Absolute Beginner)

Foundations of Python Network Programming (Foundations)

Python Cookbook

Game Programming with Python, Lua, and Ruby (Game Development)

Python

Game Programming With Python (Game Development Series)

Format: Paperback
Author: Sean Riley
ReleaseDate: 24 October, 2003
Publisher: Charles River Media
Rating:

Very good introduction to game coding
Python is so powerful that you can quickly get a feel for the subject by coding a bit. I know Python pretty well and I find that it is often an excellent way to quickly explore new programming concepts. At work, you may have to use a different language, but at least you will know the subject. That's how I got to understand XML and unit testing for example. A good book always helps the process though.

As a newbie to games, I found this book to be an excellent introduction to game coding. It basically walks you through the material you need to create simple 2D real time games on OpenGL, including how to code simple multiplayer games (using Twisted for the networking). It does an excellent job of demystifying basic game concepts and makes me think that I could write a simple game myself, given sufficient time.

The code samples, which I mostly did not run though, are well-crafted and minimalist - just enough to get the job done and no more. This is very clean and expressive code where every line serves a purpose.

I am more interested by turn-by-turn web-based 2D games, so I am currently not using the book all that much. However, once I have figured out my user interface, I will surely return to it to learn how to manage game objects, persistence, game states, and the like.

One caveat, and not a big one. As another reviewer stated, the book excels at showing how to develop modular code by gradually building libraries of reusable code that you can use for a number of games. The author pulls off the trick of doing that in a Python-sensible manner, without adding the overhead that Java/C++ would require, but that Python doesn't.

However, the resulting code, while extremely well thought out, easy to describe, and modular, is distributed though multiple classes in numerous files . This makes it somewhat hard to just start hacking his code. I quickly got lost while trying to modify the network protocol he used for the sample tic-tac-toe application.

In other words, while his code structure is very appropriate to a serious production system, I feel that it is a bit too complex for me to use as a starting point. Monolithic code has many drawbacks but can provide an easier _initial_ learning curve.

I just love it ...
The book is clear, concise, fun tu read and I do recommend it fully. When I buy a book with source code I first run the examples and then I start reading, so I followed all the installation steps and every single example worked nicely so. If you are serious about writing your own online game and learning Python, get this one. It 's worth the money.

Great introduction - terrible support
I am only through to chapter 6 after getting it last week and it is a great introduction. I fully agree with an earlier reviewer of this book. However all the examples do rely on the author's own Python user interface library which does not work.

So don't expect to be able to run much of the sample code in this book. But it's a great read if you want to learn the theory behind game and simulation design with Python.