Elementary Game Programming & Simulations Using Jamagic [With CDROM]

Elementary Game Programming & Simulators Using Jamagic certainly lives up to its title. As a "green" programmer who just started learning C++, this book was perfect for me in grasping the overall concepts of 3D programming before diving in too deep, yet still using some of the language that I learned. Jamagic "automates" much of the repetitive programming typically done with 3D games, and also the Jamagic language is very similar to Javascript (which is similar to C++); therefore Jamagic worked well for my purposes.Mr. Perez's book took me through the important topics of 3D programming, giving me the overview I wanted and showing me results quickly. The book focuses on three main projects: a simple 3D game, a flight simulator, and a ship simulator. Mr. Perez explains the code in a simple manner that is easy to understand. Each step of each project builds on the previous step.Since this book does have a few typos and inconsistencies that turned me off, I couldn't give it all five stars. All in all, I found this book invaluable for easily learning the concepts of 3D game programming, such as texture mapping, shading, introductory modeling, and calculating distances in 3D with the Pythagorean theorem. I recommend this book for anyone starting out in Jamagic and for those like me who don't want to dive too deep into C++ to learn the concepts of 3D programming.

I did not know Jamagic when I first picked up this book. I have found Jamagic to be a very cool 3D game builder tool.The author does a very good job explaining the syntax and has an interesting (non-boring) way of leading the reader thru a complete game project.The sphere lander, flight simulator and ship simulator are also interesting projects you don't see in other books.A person with a lot of other programming experience might find the book a little slow, but if you don't know anything you will not be overwhelmed.I am really looking forward to the advanced version of the book.