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Focus On SDL (The Premier Press Game Development Series)
by Ernest Pazera
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Course Technology PTR (2002-11-18)
ISBN: 1592000304
EAN: 9781592000302
UPC: 082039500300
Dewy Decimal #: 794.815365
Paperback: 336 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: 08020129
Condition: New As issued no jac
Comments: New book with CD. Trade paperback with no marks or creases. Appears unread. Beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Focus On SDL is your key to writing programs faster and with greater ease. Execute the same applications as with DirectX, but with more versatility. SDL allows you to pack up your code and go! If you have a basic knowledge of C++, you're ready to roll. Dive into advanced topics such as alpha blending and overlays, or intensify your game audio with the SDL_mixer add-on library. This book teaches you how to write the code and then distribute it to various platforms. From setting up your system to incorporating networking and user interface components, Focus On SDL gives you the tools you need in one comprehensive guide.
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Customer Reviews
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Great...but nothing you can't easily find online!
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-09-09
In conversation and on GDNet I have been condescending of this book and for that I must apologize - It is a great book for learning the Simple Direct-Media Library.
I would definitely recommend this book if it makes you feel better to own a hard copy guide to SDL. However, I learned more through trial-and-error using only the online documentation.
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Good intro. to SDL if you already have C++ knowledge and a copy of VC++
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-03-06
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
It's a pretty good introduction to SDL I think. A bit misleading though being part of the 'Game Development Series' but it doesn't teach how to make a game at all. By the end of the book you'll be able to put a bmp on the screen and play a sound file.
Also, the back cover says "This book teaches you how to write code and then distribute it to various platforms." Which is kind of a lie!
It never explained how to distribute or even set up Mac OS X or Linux or anything besides setting it up in VC++. I mainly got this book because I want to create a game for Linux and Mac OS X and MS Windows. I had to search online and do a lot of trial and error to eventually get all the samples to compile on Linux and OS X. It never even mentions how to set up SDL on anything other than VC++.
I think this might've been frustrating if you didn't know how to use VC++ and C++ pretty well and wanted to do truly cross-platform SDL code.
After this book I read a couple online tutorials on SDL and am also now reading Programming Linux Games (which has to do with SDL too) and the official SDL documentation and after all that I think I'll have a decent grasp on SDL.
For somebody with pretty good C++ knowledge and at least some VC++ IDE knowledge though it isn't a bad intro to SDL especially for its size. It's a very small book I read it in two days and then spent a day making sense of it all in Linux and Mac OS X besides just VC++ but I don't regret reading it.
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Great but a little short
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-02-13
I agree with most of the other reviews about this book. It does a good job of covering the basics of SDL, without tons of fluff. While I wish it had been a little bit longer, it included exactly what it said: an overview of SDL. The first two sections of the book, covering the core SDL library and some of the extra related libraries, were just the right amount of detail and explanation for someone who likes to peruse the material in book form. The author does a good job of talking to people who know how to write software, but who haven't had much experience with SDL.
The last third of the book was also basically filler, with a brief and relatively useless explanation of the author's preferred infrastructure for writing SDL games and apps.
Overall, I highly recommend this book, particularly if you can purchase it at it's relatively low cost used price. The quality was much higher than many of the other Premier Press/Prima Tech books.
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An overview of SDL...
Rating  (3)
Date: 2005-12-22
6 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
I am a sophmore in college studying computer engineering, and I bought this book in the hopes that it would help me with a programming project for school. The main thing that this book has going for it is the fact that it is actually writing about SDL... not many other books go into this subject and it is refreshing to see a book that doesn't limit itself to the Windows/DirectX world.
The book is written in easy to understand language and is very helpful in showing what SDL is capable of. It proceeds to show readers how to set up most of SDL's different subsystems.
The main problem with this book is that it does not go into detail about any of the topics it covers. If you're curious about how to use SDL's video/graphics capablity, for instance, you will learn how to initialize the system and draw some circles on the screen. The book has smaller pages than most, and the 54 pages long chapter on the video subsystem doesn't take long to get through. It leaves you wanting to know more.
In short, this book will skim over different topics in SDL and teach you enough to get started. You will need to look elsewhere for details. I recommend purchasing this book to get you on the right track, but just know that you will need to search the internet for tutorials and example applications before you can seriously write games. This book is only a beginning.
Since you are looking at a book on SDL, I assume you are trying either to learn how to program games/graphical applications for Linux, or are trying to make it so that the code you write can have multi-platform support. If this is the case, I would recommend looking at "Linux Game Programming" by Mark Collins (in the same series as this book) and "Programming Linux Games" by Loki Software/John Hall as well. Of these three books, I like "Programming Linux Games" best since it goes into greater detail and walks you through the creation of a basic, but complete game for Linux. Even though it has Linux in the title, most of the APIs it touches on (SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, etc.) are cross-platform, so what you learn is not limited to Linux alone. For the project I was working on, I found myself jumping amoung the aforementioned books and online tutorials such as those at NeHe.
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Very good for entry level game developers.
Rating (4)
Date: 2004-12-03
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Most books on game development today simply rehash material that is already available in countless other books. The Focus On series is a refreshing change. Though considerably thinner than the fullsize counterparts, the Focus On books dive right into the material you want to learn. This was certainly true in the case of Focus On SDL.
The book gets you going immediately, setting up your compiler and getting a window on the screen. From there, you build on what has already been covered to show off various features of SDL.
My biggest complaint about this book, much like one of the other reviewers, was that the book did not give much information about setting SDL up with OpenGL. The information available on the internet is very good and will allow you to fill in any missing pieces of the book, but if you're like me and would like a physical book to thumb through rather than a web reference, this book is perfect.
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