Name: Game Programming Gems
ISBN: 9781584500490

What Hacker News says

jcalxSep 2026

I have formative (to my interest in programming) memories of going to Barnes & Noble and cracking open those huge Graphics Gems and Game Programming Gems books. Just an amazing wealth of topics and tricks and I learned something new on every page. Red Blob Games [0] is the closest thing in spirit these days but I do miss those books.

[0] https://www.redblobgames.com/

thread

kevinsyncSep 2023

I still have this on my shelf and worked through it cover to cover more than once in middle and high school in the 90's. LaMothe was a massive inspiration and, while I'm not totally convinced that these types of project-based instructional books are as relevant in the 2023 world of Github / blogs / etc, I really miss being walked through a complex piece of software from beginning to end with commentary and supporting code in a giant book that you can touch and feel and flip through the pages of.

Also very much worth shouting out Mark DeLoura's 'Game Programming Gems' series -- I'm not sure how it even happened, but I got a chapter published in the first volume while being a 17 year old kid who had zero professional experience in any industry of any kind lol (I just replied to a call for submissions on Gamasutra, was told 'ok code it up and write a paper' and I did. And they printed it!)

thread

doucheJan 2015

I'll put my vote in for Buckland's Programming Game AI by Example. It is very approachable, code-heavy, and it's also got some great examples to visualize the techniques discussed. Very easy to translate what you learn reading this book into any projects of your own, particularly if you take the time to actually code the examples and work through the exercises at the end of the chapter.

I've got a copy of Ian Millington's AI book that I need to finish reading. So far it seems to be very good. It's not as example-driven, but it seems to have good breadth on real-world game AI topics.

The Game Programming Gems series is worth reading through, if, as others have noted, a little dated in places. The general game design and AI sections hold up better than some of the high-performance math and graphics tweaks included from that era. I believe a good portion of them are available for free online, although I may be confusing one of the other Gems series.

thread

chickenandriceAug 2014

Actually, game companies as well as various indie developers have widely distributed this knowledge. Some examples of places to look/things to search for implementations or similar/better:

-GDC Slide Decks -Game Programming Data Structure/Performance Books -Game Industry Publications - ex: Game Programming Gems -EA STL -Game Dev Sites -Any available source to various engines/games in the last many years should have more than a few inside

Moreover, this is also a common thing in a lot of embedded and high-performance development in general.

Just because someone didn't make a github project and post it on HN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This seems to be a trend with web developers - reinventing what exists without properly checking what is there, and doing so usually poorly. I say this as someone who has done game development and web development at various points of my career (currently web by day, game by night) so I am not trying to be condescending, just pointing out an unfortunate trend.

Downvote if you want, but I see the first game dev who replied already confirmed what I said.

thread

angersockSep 2013

I've read or owned several of those books at one point or another. Some opinions:

The Game Programming Gems series has a wonderful variety of articles, and even though many of the graphics tricks are no longer super useful the software engineering and exposure to how other people think about systems is very useful.

The O'Reily Physics for Game Developers is kind of lacking--it's more a cookbook than anything else; the Eberly books are a much better use of time, and actually explore the math much better.

Computational Geometry in C by O'Rourke is wonderful, but a bit academic for almost any game development purposes.

Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics has a permanent place on my desk, and was very useful when doing graphics work as well as CAD software stuff. It actually bothers with some of the rigor of the linear algebra you'll use in graphics. Not listed but An Integrated Introduction to Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling by Goldman does a superb job of the mathematics behind projective geometry for graphics, and is probably one of the best ways I've ever read for getting the real reason why we do the math we do. He's referenced in the Geometric Tools book.

Write Portable Code has some great insights, but if you've had to deal with cross-platform code for more than a couple of years you probably won't find too much new. For a beginner it's invaluable.

CLRS Introduction to Algorithms is very cool and all, but as Johnathon Blow pointed out in a talk the fact is that for game development you are better off using the dumbest, most straight-forward data structures you can. There are a lot of great things in there, but the sort of workhorse stuff you'll use in games (BSPs, quad- or octrees, hash tables, A-star, etc.) is either already made for you or is better covered elsewhere. Looks impressive on the bookshelf though.

AI Game Development was a very long, very interesting read, but tended to be somewhat academic. Programming Believable Characters For Computer Games is much better from a practical standpoint, surveying a large number of AI techniques and the implementation of examples for each one (very much a sort of "Seven AI Architectures in Seven Weeks" kind of affair).

Not on the list, but two I'd really recommend:

Game Scripting Mastery by Varanese is basically "Compiler and Interpreter Design and Implementation for High Schoolers". It's a massive tome, and covers both Lua integration and then rolling a scripting engine from scratch (lex and yacc and all).

Game Coding Complete by McShaffry is utterly fantastic. Another tome (just shy of 1000 pages), it goes over how to structure a game, covering a lot of important but banal stuff like resource management and passing Microsoft Windows certifications and project management and the like. It's also written in a very entertaining manner, and has lots of helpful anecdotes about why things should be done a particular way--often by counterexample of what happens when they weren't.

In general, the various Gems series are all worth reading. Morgan Kaufmann does a pretty solid job, and tends to have a lot of math (if that's your thing). Charles River Media is mostly good.

Premier Press Game Development varies widely in quality--some of the books are amazing, many are meh, some are garbage.

thread

choffsteinSep 2012

You might want to check out the "AI Game Programming Wisdom" series. I think at this point, there are four of them. "Game Programming Gems" is another series worth checking out (I think there are 8 at this point); each book normally has a section on game AI.

The books are a series of articles written by industry practitioners solving a problem they have run across. Normally the articles contain inline code, and the books come with a CD with executable examples and code to accompany the articles.

thread