4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Title is misleading, Aug 6 2008
By J. S. Harbour - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Java ME Game Programming (Paperback)
This book has little to do with game programming. It's a book about MIDP 2.0 programming with Java ME for building mobile applications (using GUI controls). The last three chapters (which are quite small) touch on tiles and sprites. So basically you've got a 400+ page book while only about 50 pages is actually about programming mobile games? I would have STARTED the book with chapter 13 and moved on from there into various game topics, instead of ENDING there and doing a poor job of it. The example game in the last chapter was designed for the old 128x128 screens and is probably about 4-5 years old (with 8x8 sprites) which is unacceptable for a book released in 2007 with this title. This is a GOOD book on MIDP 2.0 programming...if you ignore the "game" part of the title. I used this book to teach a course on the subject, but will need to find another for next semester.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Skim read, Oct 17 2007
By Joshua Newnham "Josh" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Java ME Game Programming (Paperback)
In all honestly I can't give this a accurate rating as I only skimmed through it. The reason being that I was expected something similar to the first edition but found it was completely different and focused less on game development and more on fundamental MIDP2.0 programming. People who are interested in learning JavaME will find this book interested. Anyone looking for a updated version of the excellent first edition will not find much here - but that's only my opinion.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
If I didn't know Java already, I'd be really confused, Mar 30 2008
By Ray Crooks - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Java ME Game Programming (Paperback)
Like one of the other reviewers, I got this book because it was required for one of my classes. This book is kind of a paradox, in that it's meant for beginners as it tries to explain things in excruciating detail, but it somehow manages to do a really poor job of it. It does a good enough job of explaining the software that you need, but once it gets into code samples, it ends up saying almost nothing using a lot of words. There are many parts where the same thing is explained two or three times over, while other important parts of the code are glossed over.
The worst part is that the text is littered with typos, which is especially bad because many of the typos are of class and method names, and even worse because I've noticed several typos within the code samples. If they had an editor for this book, he should be shot.
I would not recommend this book unless you really needed it for a class, like I did. I can understand most of what it's trying to explain (albeit after reading some things over two or three times), but if I didn't know a good bit of Java already, I'd be totally lost with this book.