Rating:
(11 reviews)
Author: Roger Engelbert
ISBN : 178216734X
New from $40.49
Format: PDF
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About the Author
Roger Engelbert
Roger Engelbert is a game developer with over ten years of experience in developing online games. He grew up surrounded by video games and thinks of classic, 8-bit arcade titles as a form of art. He is the author behind the blog Done With Computers, which is chock-full of tutorials on game development and design. Roger sincerely hopes to soon live in a world where people of all ages will be given the knowledge and opportunity to experience the joy of building their own games.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Cocos2d-X by Example Beginner's Guide Paperback
- Paperback: 246 pages
- Publisher: Packt Publishing (April 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 178216734X
- ISBN-13: 978-1782167341
- Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 7.4 x 9.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Cocos2d-X by Example Beginner's Guide
As with other beginner's books by this publisher, the book starts by indicating the installation process, and the proverbial "hello, world" project. The example is very trivial, but serves the important explanation of project structure, what's what in the project. Testing gets paid attention, which is nice, and then some recommendations on additional tools for sprites, textures etc. Maybe the absolute beginner can feel a little bit daunted by the amount of info to digest in the first chapter, regarding the many classes and infrastructure that you need to make a simple hello world. Luckily as the book progresses the concepts get clarified and expanded on, and that is what chapter 2 does, because obviously the hints in the chapter 1 are not enough.
I personally prefer books that explain things first rather than other books that expect you to infer things from examples. I like that Chapter 2 explains the pieces that make Cocos tick, the Containers, Nodes, Scenes, Layers, the Director, Caches etc. The author then proceeds to guiding the unexperienced developer to a basic understanding of C++ Classes, header files and all, explaining almost every line, and finishes off by bridging the differences between C++ developers and Cocos2D developers so they are familiar with the common ground offered by the framework.
Without further ado, Chapter 3 sees us create the first game, where we finally start to see some action by adding resources, preloading sounds, targeting retina displays, extending CCSprite, and even adding multitouch. It's nice because a functional game is created step by step. One also realizes that game dev is relatively complex even when it's a simple game. The book again follows the way of showing the code and then proceeding to explain it line by line.
Cocos2D-X stands as a great way to switch from single-platform to multi-platform game development. This great framework effectively allows developers to maintain a single codebase while publishing to a huge number of platforms. Although it is as great as it sounds, the amount of information available on how to learn/use it is scarce, to say the least.
This book - Cocos2d-X by Example Beginner's Guide - presents itself as THE way for experienced Cocos2d-iPhone developers to make the switch to multi-platform development, by using the Cocos2d-X framework. It accomplishes that feat by introducing the basics of the C++ programming language and explaining how you can apply your knowledge of Cocos2d to build great multi-platform games. It follows a step-by-step approach and provides detailed explanations on how to effectively transition from the Objective-C"-centric" Cocos2d-iPhone to the C++"-based" Cocos2d-X.
Throughout this book, you'll build five (somewhat complex) little games that will allow you to learn how to use texture atlases, handle animations, create parallax layers, handle physics and particles, among other essential tasks.
As it stands, this is the best Cocos2d-X resource I've encountered. It's aimed at experienced developers with knowledge of Cocos2d-iPhone, but I believe that it's actually pretty easy for an inexperienced programmer to gather some useful information from this book. The way that the author presents the information is clear and concise. He rarely misses important facts/info and even offers some extra tidbits of useful information along the way.
I came across a few inconsistencies and errors throughout the book, mainly in the code's formatting.