Beginner's Guide to Game Animation Programming

Well worth picking up if you already have the basics.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

A genuinely enjoyable read that also taught me a great deal.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The chapters on game development are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. The author avoids over-explaining, which keeps the pace up but means you need to pay attention. If you have the prerequisites, this is an easy recommendation. I will be keeping it on my desk rather than the shelf.

Solid and well-organised. A couple of chapters dragged a little.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Some of the diagrams are dense and I had to reread a few sections, though that may just be me. Good value for the price and worth the time it takes to work through properly.