Game Programming With Python, Lua, and Ruby

Rating:
Summary: mediocre overview
Review: I flipped through this book before buying it, so I should have known what I was getting, but still I was disappointed. The discussion of the languages is pretty elementary. I was hoping that the discussion of game libraries for the various libraries would be of value, but the selection presented is much smaller than you can easily find online - and being a book, the information presented is out of date, too.

Additionally, there are some pretty atrocious editing errors, including syntax errors in the code that completely obscure the point being made, as well as figures incorrectly matched with their respective captions.

It's not ALL bad, though. There are a few examples here and there that changed the direction of how I considered using Python in games.

Rating:
Summary: Very thin
Review: I hate giving this book a bad review because I ordered it without seeing the Table of Contents. If I had seen it, I would've known it wasn't what I was looking for. In any case, I don't think the book has anything useful in it for intermediate or experienced programmers. Normally I would say that this book is for beginners only, but I don't think it covers any of the scripting languages well enough for beginners.

The introductory chapter is mostly fluff, as it is in most computer books. Each language has 3 chapters dedicated to it: the first is a crash course on the language, the second introduces some useful extensions for the language (without explaining them well enough for you to be able to use them), and the third lists some existing projects that use the language. The concluding chapter has a little information on extending the scripting languages, and a comparative list of pros and cons.

Because the book is too short to reasonably cover three languages and their various extensions, it should've avoided explaining them and directed the user to the online documentation for them. With the possible exception of the Ruby SDL extension, which is only documented in Japanese, the online documentation is much better. The online documentation probably could've been distributed with the binaries that came with the CD.

When I bought this book, I was hoping to find some examples of game and game engine architecture/design that use scripting languages. Some are written with C/C++ extending the scripting language, and others are written the other way around. I wanted to see examples of both, with explanations of how the code was organized and why it was organized that way. Memory and performance pitfalls should be pointed out, along with tips on debugging and profiling.