Comments about oreilly Darkstar: The Java Game Server:

I am taking a college Java class, and when I told my professor I was interested in game servers (http://www.esgameservers.com) , he recommended this book to me. The book is easy to follow in most places, but a few sections are a tad ambiguous. This is a good book for beginners, but I think if I knew a lot about servers and Java, I would have found it a tedious read.

Comments about oreilly Darkstar: The Java Game Server:

This book was good for getting started with the basics and there was some different information than the tutorials that come with the sgs download. The custom authentication section was worthwhile. The channels information was inaccurate and in fact, gives you the idea that you are sending information directly from client to client even though it obviously is going through the server. A few pages ran off the page when printed out. Quite a number of errors in the code, which is frustrating to have to debug an a code section just to get it to work.

For the price, I'm not too disappointed since it led me in the right direction on a couple of points but I definitely expected it to be cleaner and more accurate. You can find good information in the tutorials and forums. I can't recommend this book due to the problems.

Comments about oreilly Darkstar: The Java Game Server:

While the book was as the previous reviewer states a pretty good step by step tutorial. I find the Lab-7201: Project Darkstar presentation shown in May at JavaOne more informative. In addition to this, simple mistakes in the code make you wonder if the author syntax checked his program. At 10 dollars it might be worth it if you are really struggling with the idea of persistance, managed objects, references and bindings, but i would try looking through the darkstar forums for awnsers.

Comments about oreilly Darkstar: The Java Game Server:

It has been a really good, light-weight introduction to getting a client/server up and running with Darkstar. It lets you get past that frustrating initial feeling you get when trying to deal with a complex new programming library, and you don't want to dig through the project docs which are meant as a comprehensive reference as opposed to a step-by-step tutorial which is what the O'Reilly shortcuts book was about.