Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

This is a great book - or, at least, was a great book. It's examples, code, and SDK design considerations are all outdated now. The Safari game (if downloaded) plays fine on the iPhone 3Gs, but breaks on the iPhone 4 because of the resolution. (The resolution of the screen is hard-coded into the source.)

These changes over time are not the fault of the authors, but rather, Apple's changes to the SDK and product line.

What we really need is to retire this book and give us a 2nd Edition for iOS 4.x. I want to see O'Reilly's Safari Adventure for iPad!

-John

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

The code as written in the book is completely different from the downloadable examples, neither of which will compile. I was loving this book until halfway through Chapter 3 when the code ceased to work. I would love an updated version with working examples, but as it stands I'm not even convinced somebody read this before going to press. This is NOT up to O'Reilly's otherwise impeccable standards. It has left me weeping over a pile of broken code and broken dreams.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

This was a perfect book for me because I had a nearly complete but unreleased game written in Java. This book tells how to build a game using the tile world format which is how I had programmed my game in Java. The format is so similar I was able to write a converter for my previous maps and use them in my iPhone version. Within a week I had a version of my game running on an iPod touch. I can understand people's frustrations because I had to spend a lot of time reading the code and re-reading the chapters. But I do have my game running on the hardware and truly hope to release it this year on the app store. I also have three other iPhone programming books and I have had to draw upon all of them. This was the hardest of all my books but the one that was most valuable for me. It doesn't work well as a general introduction but for a tile world/platformer type game it has great information.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

A book about programming games where the authors are unable to string two lines of code together so that the reader can actually implement the code themselves.

DON'T BUY THIS BOOK.

It seemed like a really great book and I'm sure it's a lot of fun but you can't actually use it unless you're simultaneously trying reading the corrections document and the book -- Even then I can't follow the code.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

The book is well written with good examples, but the first chapters where the reader is supposed to build a framework contains many errors (such as invoking graphics functions on the wrong thread). I spent a lot of time figuring out the code and was surprised to see that the downloadable code was completely different. What started out as a beautiful framework, turned out to be non-functional, and when all the errors had been corrected it felt unnecessary.

It is not true what the editor says below: that the code is functional if the reader follows the book from page one to the end.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

As others have noted, the sample code that can be downloaded is a lot different than that in the book. But the WORST part? - If you download the code for the Chapter 4 game it builds just fine in XCode. But as soon as it launches in the iPhone Simulator, it CRASHES! I can't even put debug breakpoints in the code. As soon as the background for the game appears (the buttons have not yet been displayed) the app crashes with a bad memory access error that I can't track down! But where does it crash?? I can't figure out where to look! As I mentioned, even if I put a breakpoint on the first line of main(), it never reaches that breakpoint! Argghhh!If the authors are going to supply code, they should at least make sure it WORKS before releasing it. As I stated, it BUILDS just fine, but does NOT run! If I could get the code to actually run, so I can step through it, I would gladly increase my rating of of this book.If any of you have got it to run, please let me know! You can reach me at [@]

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

Yes - there are source code errors, but they're all listed in the downloadable source, and the fact it doesn't all compile straight away means you have to think about it!
The book has lots of really good ideas that I haven't seen in other books, and gets straight to the heart of game development almost immediately using an excellent approach you can use time and again.
This isn't all about how to use the XCode IDE to create simple apps, it's all about code. You will need previous programming experience before reading this book (C++ or Java probably).

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

Chapters 4 and 5 source code will not compile and run. This is a bit annoying seeing as the chapters start off by telling you to download the source code. Are we expected to copy and paste the code from the files into our own projects to make it work? This is not good.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

It is really hard to understand the first examples from this book. I spent a half of a day to understand them. But now it is clear for me. I have some ideas how to improve this book and I can help to solve your problems.

Comments about O'Reilly Media iPhone Game Development:

I'm really disappointed from Chapter 3 onward. Chapter 2 was excellent and really helped me wrap my brain around the problems in game development. Then I hit Chapter 3 and it was complete madness. The code samples they give in the text are not complete enough to run and after typing it up as I thought I was directed, I had to sort through a dozen errors right off the bat - none of which were typos but misunderstanding the instructions. I downloaded the sample code and used that to help guide me, but it was a major pain to reconcile what the text was saying compared to what the sample code had.

Example: on page 73, the example code puts all of the drawing in the Render function - this doesn't work and is NOT how the sample code is written. The beginner is never going to understand this and without looking at the sample code from sourceforge they are never going to solve the error.

I purposely like to type the code in when I'm working through a book. I don't WANT to download the code and just run it. I need to type it to understand it.

To the editor that responded to the other post: sorry, but BZZZZZ. The book has code that doesn't match the samples, and the code that would need to be added to make the examples more complete would only take a few lines at most.

Don't buy. At best, get a Safari subscription and read chapters 1 and 2, peruse the rest then go build it yourself. Or just download the sample code and use it as a base.