Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Its clear from reading through the book that the author has some insight into MIDP2.0 games programming and the business of getting them running well and published, however this book ultimately fails to convey this information to the user.
The author starts out saying that he's not going to spend much time explaining game programming because there are many books on the subject, yet wastes precious time explaining MIDP itself - a topic for which there are considerable numbers of books available. For a book on MIDP game programming, the book actually wastes a considerable number of pages not actually building games. By the time it actually gets to the Game API (Chapter 9 on page 137/334) nearly half the book is over. Once we finish with the one "solid" chapter on the Game API all one will gain is a sampling of information about the general operation of the Game API and layers but it is explained in such little detail that you'll end up having to buy another book to get details about it.
One of the biggest letdowns of this book once it DOES start talking about the Game API occurs when attempting to discuss working with worlds larger than the handset size - something fundamental to most games and crucial to understand for building performant games. The Author covers this entire topic in 2 paragraphs and doesn't even provide a line of code to explain it.
So misguided is parts of the book that it wastes 10 pages trying to discuss JBUilder Mobile Edition and 4 discussing Brew. These wouldn't be such outrageous wastes if the author had actually been more forthcoming in the chapter on the GameAPI in actually telling and showing people what they needed to know in order to use the Game API effectively.
Didn't actually learn anything more about the Game API than I already knew just reading the Sun website. But hey, I do know some more information about the PNG file format history. Look elsewhere. As a professional programmer in this space I found this book to be greatly disappointing.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Wireless Game Development in Java with MIDP 2.0 (Wordware Game Developer's Library)
Designed for programmers who want to capitalize on the growing mobile game market, Wireless Game Development in Java with MIDP 2.0 illustrates the programming and development of games for wireless phones using J2ME and MIDP 2.0. The foundations of J2ME and MIDP, as well as discussions of the Game API and support for tiles, sprites, animation, and MIDI music, are presented, along with a complete example of a working game.
0 comments:
Post a Comment