geldonyetich
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Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns is easily one of the better programming books around. These logic patterns came from his experiences as a professional programmer and are an invaluable shortcut for the rest of us. I could point out that he has not invented these patterns so much as provided a name and discussed the practicality of their use. For example, his "Subclass Sandbox" pattern is basically the inevitable result of object-oriented polymorphism at work. Further, I worry that thinking in patterns may hobble problem-solving creativity, despite the inevitability of these patterns meaning that you would end up reinventing the wheel not to know of them. However, neither of these nitpicks really diminish the usefulness of the book. It has proven core to establishing communication between game developers and will save you a lot of time. Nystrom provides a free online copy to read; buying copies of the book is somewhat a formality to thank him for his efforts.
11 people found this review helpful
Loïck Jeanneret
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This was the first time I read a book in the 5 past years and it was amazing, it has cool concepts and manages to keep you interested with small fun notes from the author. If you ever tried to make even a small game "from scratch" without using some kind of framework and know a bit of C++ you will probably fall in love with this book. I cannot wait to start a new project and try to apply some of the concepts presented in this book in the wild! I definitely recommend it to everyone who wants to try to write clearer code, even if it's not directly related to games.
117 people found this review helpful
Alex Barber
This is an excellent book documenting design patterns that are very handy in C++ (or similar OOP languages) game engine programming, and I'd recommend it to anybody in the field. That said, the book doesn't cover much in the way of modern C++ (beyond very basic C++11), so I'd recommend reading some literature on that as well. Also, to a very new programmer, this book is likely to give you a complex about CPU prefetch optimization. Don't worry about that until you're up and running.
119 people found this review helpful