Rating: 
Summary: KNOW YOUR CALCULUS!
Review: While I did find this book informative, I must warn potential readers that very advanced math is required to make any sense at all of this book. I'm not talking matrices and trig, here, folks. This book assumes knowledge of Integral calculus and differential equations. My integral calculus is rusty, having never used it since college, and I never did take differential equations. Luckily, I used my trusty college calculus book to review so that I could interpret this book. I have read dozens of books on 3D graphics and game design, including Math of Game Programmers, and this book is the most mathematically involved.
Rating:
Summary: KNOW YOUR CALCULUS!
Review: While I did find this book informative, I must warn potential readers that very advanced math is required to make any sense at all of this book. I'm not talking matrices and trig, here, folks. This book assumes knowledge of Integral calculus and differential equations. My integral calculus is rusty, having never used it since college, and I never did take differential equations. Luckily, I used my trusty college calculus book to review so that I could interpret this book. I have read dozens of books on 3D graphics and game design, including Math of Game Programmers, and this book is the most mathematically involved.
Rating: 
Summary: feet per second per second?
Review: While mathematically a good start and interesting in places. The book has one major failing point. (Not counting the completely black image of black particles on a black background.)The US, Burma (or whatever they demand we call it this year) and Libya are the only places where such cryptic units as *slugs*, feet, pounds, mi/h and psi are used. If you think in Metric, like most of the world, you will be wondering why you wasted your money on this book.
Rating:
Summary: Archaic units and sparse context saps potential
Review: While the book has some value (primarily owing to its choice of topic and introductory level), the impact it might have is greatly reduced by its examples reliance on non-metric units -- and a variety of dissimilar choices at that. It makes as much sense as using EBCDIC in your examples in a work on text processing. The result is that the examples suffer a loss of literal value if you wanted to quickly transplant them into a project that has the good sense to use metric measures to avoid confusion over unit conversions. Secondly, the code examples are sparsely documented. This causes trouble if one wants to transcode one into another language (as I did in taking the flag simulation to Java). One is reduced to blinking and trying to figure out whether the first or second dimension of an array in the author's example corresponds to the flag's height along the pole or its "fly". He's presented a lot in this code, and there are so few comments in it to clarify the arbitrary choices within that a great benefit would have been realized had he added a few. Even had they been taken from the text of the chapter, they would have produced a more valuable result. I would love to see Mr Bourg attempt a second edition that attended to some of these needless editorial choices.
| 
