Teach yourself game-programming in 21 days

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1. perpilDec 2022
   Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days https://a.co/d/bYPxBpw was an earlier book of his and it was a really good introduction the concepts necessary to build 2D games. I doubt I'd be half the programmer I am today if I hadn't pored over it. I still remember fixing some of the bugs in his transparent sprite rendering code .
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2. tibbonSep 2023
   Is it just me, or were so many books from this era just outright bad?

   I spent a few years teaching at General Assembly, and in that time I learned so much about pedology, how I often learn, how others learn, and that I can't always assume the way I learn will be appropriate for others, particularly in text format.

   I had Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days, by Andre LaMothe when I was an early teen. I made repeated attempts at learning game programming with it, finding only failure each time. Maybe I wasn't cut out for programming? I put it away, and went to school for music instead.

   Years later, no thanks to this book, I'm a pretty good programmer. I've looked over it again, and I'm aghast at what I see. It bills itself as needing no real experience. It jumps from "this is a mouse" in chapter 1, to some pretty advanced VGA screen manipulation between chapters 2 and 3. Loops, functions, OOP, data types? Nah - it just throws code at you without concepts. It is shocking if anyone learned from this. I was worse off having read it, and nearly 30 years later kinda salty about it!

   I'm good at learning from books too! I taught myself Ruby after reading _why's poigiant guide, Agile Development with Ruby on Rails, the Pickaxe book, POODR, and the Ruby internals book. If a book structures information well, and I can sit and work on practice problems, I can get the concept.

   Maybe we learned a lot about how to write programming books around this era? I've generally found books on O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, No Starch Press, etc to be rather good. They generally consider how to structure learning and information in a way that is progressive and don't make too many leaps. These "Learn in X days" style books in the 90's were basically info dumps, and without Google it was nearly impossible as a kid in the 90's to get help. No adults around me had any idea, and if it didn't work - it didn't work.

   I'm curious what the breakthrough was, or what changed. The first decent programming book I ever read was Programming Perl by Larry Wall. I came to it much later, but the ANSI C book made a ton of sense upon first read too.

   A good modern intro to game development (and Rust) can be found with Hands-on Rust: Effective Learning through 2D Game Development and Play. It doesn't dive deep into the more difficult parts of Rust, but it also doesn't make you feel like an idiot.

   For a look back at 90's games, the Game Engine Black Book: DOOM by Fabien Sanglard really helped me understand the systems and logic of Doom and other similar games.

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