Game Engineering (Paperback)

Almost excellent. A second edition could easily push it to five stars.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. A good addition to a technical library, as long as you know what you are buying.

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

I came to this book already familiar with the basics, and it still had plenty to offer. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.