Game Programming Gems 3 [With CDROM]

I got his book for my husband, who is a programmer, and this one is his favorite of the series. He refers to it on a regular basis, and he says it has saved him valuable time. The graphics sections are especially usefull. A handy reference book for any programmer.

It's a little high-level, but it contains many useful ideas and uses of different algorithms for game programming.

I've noticed several scathing reviews from folks who admit in the review that they aren't even game programmers. Am I missing something? How in the world could this book be at all useful or interesting to someone who admittedly has no interest in programming games? Unbelievable.For anyone specifically interested in actually using this book to develop games, you're going to get your money's worth.

For anyone who actually works as a game programming professional, I'd highly recommend this book. Those of you looking for general-purpose interesting programming tidbits, try one of Scott Meyer's books instead, which I'd recommend to ANY C++ programmer, not game programmers.One thing to note: I've heard claims (regarding this and previous books in the series) that these books are simply pre-existing articles pulled from the web and other sources and packed into a collection to be resold. This is nonsense - every article in the book was submitted by programmers, and was exclusively commissioned and paid for by the publisher for use in this series. You won't find these articles floating around on the net. Moreover, because these articles are commissioned, peer-reviewed, and professional edited, the overall quality is much higher than random articles found on the net.Overall, this book, and the entire series for that matter, gets my highest recommendation. You're naturally not going to find every article or topic useful or relevant, but if you're actually in the trenches, the likelyhood of finding at least one article that really helps you out is likely high. In my experience, simply finding one really valuable article is worth the price of the book alone.

While normally, I don't write reviews, I HAVE to disagree with a previous review on this.. Someone wrote the matrix calculations were wrong on "Real time UI input in 3D games", and its simply not true. I'm using this gem currently and found it to work wonderfully! I found the book to be good overall, with a few minor publishing errors, but still good and worth the investment. Like Gems 1 and 2, its a must have for any game programmer shelf... I'm finding more and more modern approaches to problems, vertex shading, etc in the newer gems series.. Gems 1 holds a special place in my heart because of how breakthrough it was, but this, which not as staggering in its signficance, is just as important to the modern game programmer.