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Re: [pygame] I'm loving wills book :)



On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 11:41 AM, Lamonte(Scheols/Demonic)
<scheols@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> that pygame book, its nice, anyone learn anything new?

Hi All, I'd always meant to write a review on this book, but I've not
been able to get around to it.  I preordered it, and I've had it for a
while, but I haven't worked through the whole thing (though I've hit
most of the last chapters)

Here's a list of my opinion as far as pros and cons, which I'll try to
mention very briefly.

Pros:
- Very easy to read.
- Great examples that actually work
- Chapters 1 & 2 give a great intro to python, so this would actually
be a good book if you've never touched python before (but did have
some programming experience)
- Lots of info using pygame+opengl
- A lot of examples use his GameObject library
(http://www.willmcgugan.com/game-objects/), so a lot of the grunt-work
coding is available to use already.

Cons of the book:
- My biggest complaint is the lack of discussion on Sprites. Pygame is
really a 2D library, and I think he left out a lot of very important
information by not discussing how the Sprite class can be used.
- Only cursory discussion Sound.  If you're writing a game and just
want the basic sound effects and/or background music, this is ok.
However, if you want to do something really interesting with sound,
you'll need to dig way beyond what this book offers.

Overall, I think the book is worth getting unless you've already done
a few significant projects using pygame.  It's definately an Intro
book, and it does a really good job giving the user an idea how to put
a project together.

Disclaimer: I'm a relative noob to pygame (~10 months), and I've been
using pygame for research projects in Augmented Reality (not
necessarily games) for both visual and non-visual (sound-only)
applications.
-- 
brad [bradmontgomery.net]