Good books?

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by Xandan, Sep 5, 2009.

  1. Xandan

    Xandan Well-Known Member

    Mar 4, 2009
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    I have a lot of frees in college now and plan on learning some objective c and iPhone programming soon after. Can anyone suggest some good books preferably one on each?
     
  2. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    I'm very new to iPhone development, but I come from a programming/graphics design/game dev back when I was in high school background. But I read and skimmed the Objective-C primer and some of the gettings started guides at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/, and I bought a rough cut of iPhone Game Development, http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805265/. It hasn't been released yet, but O'Reilly is selling rough draft PDFs of it for pretty cheap. And I messed around in Xcode and Interface Builder a lot, and then I started work on my first game.

    Also, Beginning iPhone 3 Development is a good book.
     
  3. Catacomber

    Catacomber Well-Known Member

    May 21, 2009
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    http://www.zaristagames.com/
    NYC
    #3 Catacomber, Sep 6, 2009
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2009
    I picked that up too from O'Reilly. The authors have good credentials. It takes a lot of programming knowledge though to follow as essentially you're building your iphone game engine from scratch. It's wonderful! I notice they have a chapter at the end on third-party game engines just in case.

    I am going to go with Unity 3d right now because it seems like the easiest way to go but because I'd like to learn how to build a game engine in Objective C and using Xcode, am going to follow the book through to the end. From what I've read, the closer you can get to building your game using Objective C and Xcode, the more compatible things will be and the faster it will run.

    From what I've read of that book so far, the authors have a very good handle on development on iphone.
     
  4. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
    362
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    Also, I don't think there are any books out for it at all, but you should check out cocos2d-iphone. It's a 2d game programming framework written in objective-c and I'm in the process of learning it right now. It's free and open source, and it's perfectly fine to use it in your commercial games.

    I've heard of unity3d, and I've thought about looking into it, but for the near future I think I'm gonna stick to 2d. I don't have any experience doing 3d modeling or working with 3d math, and I'm kind of a retro guy, so I think 2d will never go out of style if it's done well.
     
  5. Xandan

    Xandan Well-Known Member

    Mar 4, 2009
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    Well you're all assuming I want to learn to make games.. That's further down the road, right now all I want is to learn to make apps at the moment.
     
  6. Catacomber

    Catacomber Well-Known Member

    May 21, 2009
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    http://www.zaristagames.com/
    NYC
    General iphone programming---

    Programming in Objective - C by Stephen Kochan is good for programming.

    Beginning iphone Development Exploring the iphone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche is excellent.

    [I will try cocos 2d. Unity can do 2d also. There is a demo.]
     
  7. Xandan

    Xandan Well-Known Member

    Mar 4, 2009
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    Programming in Objective - C by Stephen Kochan seems a bit outdated =\
     

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