(Ebook) iPhone Game Development: Developing 2D & 3D games in Objective-C by Paul Zirkle, Joe Hogue ISBN 9780596159856, 0596159854

(Ebook) iPhone Game Development: Developing 2D & 3D games in Objective-C by Paul Zirkle, Joe Hogue ISBN 9780596159856, 0596159854

I had entered the following under the comments section of a previous and after the last 10 days of digging into code I thought I should use it to create a review. I have to admit that I had serious misgivings about purchasing this book after reading the other reviews. One of my friends at work recommended it and I eventually downloaded the Kindle edition on my iPad. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 2 chapters. I've been working on a game design for a few weeks and was glad to see that some of my thoughts/designs were not far off. I allocated an entire day to get the framework described in Chapter 3 up and running. I read the chapter first then took a day off from work and dove in. It took a solid 9 hours to get things up and running. I still have a few glitches but for the most part the framework performs as expected. One thing I'll say - it forced me to learn a lot and dig deep into the code. The result is that I now have a reasonably good understanding of the design and I think I can take it and apply it for my needs. Pounding new knowledge into one's head is generally somewhat painful - but it's not necessarily a bad way to learn.With that said, it would have been a bit easier if the examples and book code had matched up a bit more but I'm not to keen on complete listings eating up book space - still - getting the framework in chapter 3 to run was a challenge. Now that it's behind me I'll spend a few days documenting the model. I'll clean it up where it needs to be and change those items that will make it more aligned with what I have in mind. Then I'll dive into Chapter 4. I'd rate the book with 4 stars (I originally thought only 3). As others have said, there are places in the text where the actual code doesn't match with the snippets in the book nor with the downloaded sourceforge examples. Mostly, I relied on other books that I have and the Apple documentation (or the framework H files) when I needed additional help. Working though this was like picking up someone's code at work and trying to figure out the design in preparation for a refactoring effort. Bottom line - it forced me to behave like I do at work when learning a new system. Ok - About a week later now... I've down loaded the sourceforge code for Chapter 3 and it appears to be working fine. Stepping through with the debugger is well worth the time spent. Still have some issues with it displaying properly on an iPad but I'll figure that out as I get the time (which I've now done). I've started restructuring and documenting the relevant parts of the code that I find useful. The low-level portions with textures/fonts etc. helped get my old C-pointer skills dusted off. It was a painful experience but I believe I've finally got what I need from the text. Feel like I broke a couple of shovels whilst doing the digging.Another week and a half have passed and I have used the sourceforge code to create a game framework. I've written routines to create random mazes and have added code that uses the accelerometer to let me "walk" an emu chick animation through the maze. Not perfect yet but I'll keep improving the base and documenting what I do. Lke others who have commented I was initially frustrated when I started but I followed the author's advice and after stepping through the code with the debugger and adding my own documentation it's actually not bad and extremely interesting to see how this is all put together. Of course everyone learns at a different pace and a different way. Someone in a previous post suggested that this was probably not a beginner's book... could be. I have 15+ years of C & C++ experience in my background and I admit that has helped make the transition to Objective-C a bit easier. (I had done nothing with Objective-C until about three months ago.) My advice would be to keep going... There really are some interesting "code-nuggets' inside this framework.