The Talemonger's Emporium: Answer Archive

And the Question is...

"I am a computer science student at Texas A&M University and I want to start programming games. Could you give me a list of good game programming books that will help me out? Also, what is a good text editor that I could use to write my code on? We use EMAC text editor and it is a pain in the neck."

Submitted by: Paul

Answered by: Rob Kenny (lead programmer, Sierra On-Line)

"I highly reccommend you read and understand:

The Annotated C++ Reference Manual by Ellis and Stroustrup.

"You can't get any more official than a book written by the guy who wrote the language.

"Also, I have a list of books that contain nothing but 400 pages of fluff. Avoid books with these words in their titles (I'm probably gonna get sued for this :-)

Dummy

Idiots

30 days

Guru

Tricks

Wizards.

"Typically, these kind of books contain examples for sound systems you'll never use, 3d systems you'll never use, code you'll never use. I read one book (had the word Guru in the title) where the author claimed to have discovered perspective correction ('through a little trial and error')!

"Also, programming games is not much different from programming any other application. I've been working on Leisure Suit Larry's Casino, where we've had to implement a fault tolerant, real-time, redundant backup system. Now I can get a job at NASA...

"The text editor question is quite personal. Given a choice I would use VI, only because I've been using it for 13 years. Often times you have no choice, like in MSDEV I have to use their editor, or lose their nice integrated features."