Rating: 
Summary: Extreme Help
Review: I thought that this book was EXTREMELY helpful to learning how to program games and other useful programs (I used it to make a program that finds areas of regular polygons to help me with math homework for example :) ) This book will help you learn the basics of programming which should be helpful for learning more complex languages. It may be difficult learning stuff like Loops or Arrays but the author helps you tremendously in those areas so they become quite easy. I really enjoyed this book and the game at the end of it, and I'd rate it a 6/5 if I was able to.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful For The Beginner
Review: Don't let the title of this book fool you. It is not just for TEENS. It is written so a teen could understand it, but I have been in programming for over 18 years now, and I learned a good deal from this wonderful book. The author presents the book in a humorous manner to break things up and not stoic like most books on game programming I have read. This book works great for the beginner even someone with no past programming experience. The author starts you out with the basics and builds it up from there. By the time you have completed the book you have completed some games as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn the basics of game programming. Also, I emailed the author and had a response in less than 2 hours, that is what I call service.
Rating: 
Summary: Fake Programming
Review: First off, anyone who takes this book seriously, and wants to learn how to "prgram" makes me laugh. Go take a course in programming and learn some real language.. Not some Bs language for little kids who want to pretend to make a "game". Go buy a book on Visual Basic 6.0 or Visual Basic.net, that is a very good starters language.
Rating: 
Summary: Great for parents as well as teens
Review: I am a software engineer and a parent of an 11-year-old, and I have been looking for a way to teach my son computer programming in a way that would be fun for him. I read this book cover-to-cover, and it's almost perfect for this purpose. I have no doubt that the book would be excellent for a self-starting teen to read on his or her own. But as a parent, this book is invaluable for the parent seeking short, fun, educational programming activities that will be a lot of fun for the learner (and the parent as well). Every kid loves games, and this book does a great job.I would also recommend this book to an adult who wants to learn the basics of game programming. It's a pretty fast read, very easy to follow. I personally learned a lot from this book. I've been programming computers for 30 years, but I've never written a graphics-based game before, and this book efficiently and easily goes through all the techniques for creating good games very quickly. I think it would also be fairly easily followed by a teen or adult who has never programmed before. The book uses Blitz Basic, which is optimized for writing computer games and seems to be much easier to use than Visual Basic (the computer language I first tried when teaching my child). A trial version of Blitz Basic is on the CD-ROM included with the book, and the full version (called BlitzPlus) can be purchased online if desired (but is not required). The CD-ROM also includes excellent example artwork, animations, and sounds for the games described in the book, which is a great way to get a teen or pre-teen into programming without getting bogged down with creating art and sounds from the start. By the way, this book covers creating 2D games (like Pong, Space Invaders, that sort of thing). 3D games are (I am told) much more challenging, and are covered in other books. (Blitz Basic is for 2D games; for 3D games, there is a related programming language called Blitz3D.) I have one important complaint about this book, which is why I gave it 4 stars rather than 5 stars. There are many errors in this book. It could have used more careful technical editing. For example, in the section on arrays, the author carefully explains how the indexes for a 30-element array range from 0 to 29, and cautions the reader not to try accessing element 30 (which is one past the end of the array), and then proceeds to give a sample program that makes exactly this mistake. There are several errors of this magnitude in the book, and at least a minor mistake every 3 or 4 pages. It's unfortunate, because these mistakes can be very confusing to a beginning programmer. But having said that, I still very much recommend this book. It's a good one. Congratulations to the teenage author who wrote it, excellent job!
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: I am a teenager and I have tried to read another book but didn't understand it. I got this book a couple of weeks ago and after reading the first three chapters I made a text based game of pong. Now since I have read the whole thing I have started making a whole game with graphics and everythin I had learned. If this book can teach me and keep my attention it can teach anyone who wants to know how
to make games and is looking for a book to start with I highly recommend this Book
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: I am a teenager and I have tried to read another book but didn't understand it. I got this book a couple of weeks ago and after reading the first three chapters I made a text based game of pong. Now since I have read the whole thing I have started making a whole game with graphics and everythin I had learned. If this book can teach me and keep my attention it can teach anyone who wants to know how
to make games and is looking for a book to start with I highly recommend this Book
Rating:
Summary: Teaching my 12 yo game programming
Review: I bought this book for my 12 yo son. Although he's interested in video game programming (and video games, of course), the book didn't really hold his attention.
However, it serves as a great reference for me to use to teach my son game programming. I've been walking my son through the book sequentially and that has worked well. It has some good examples early on for beginners to quickly get started producing interactive games. In that capacity, it would be nice if it had alot more exercises.
It is a nice beginner book, but I doubt we'd use it anymore (or Blitz Basic) when we finish the fundamentals. But it was a nice kick-start into programming and game programming. We had tried Flash MX before, but Blitz Basic is a better environment for beginners. As a beginner book, it would've been nice to have some tear-out language syntax cards, but I would definitely recommend it for teenagers.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for those wishing to be professionals.
Review: I don't actually own it, but I've read a considerable amount of it. It looks like a good introduction to Blitz Basic, but Blitz Basic itself is generally much simpler than languages used in industrial situations, such as C and C++, and many say that languages based on BASIC teach bad habits for those languages and is not flexible or fast enough. However, this book teaches several important language-nonspecific concepts, and is good for someone programming games for fun, rather than profit. EDIT: Note that I am NOT saying that this is a bad book for it's subject matter. I am merely saying that there are many different ways for "teens"(I happen to be one myself, if you care) to get in to game programming, some of which are more powerful and more often used professionally.
Rating:
Summary: Great for parents as well as teens
Review: I find some of the reviews quite interesting, since they judge the book based on their opinion of BlitzBasic. Firstly, let me assure you that I have learned a "real" language - I've been a professional software developer for 12 years (C/C++/Delphi/C#). As far as the book goes it is very well written and is aimed at the beginner programmer using BlitzBasic (not Blitz3D but you can still use it). That's it, that's all there is to the book. I still found it useful, however, in quickly picking up BlitzBasic (mostly the language) which allowed me to write 2D games after a day (okay, I've been doing that for years with DX/OpenGL but I'm still impressed that I can write Pong in less than 10 minutes). Why would I use Blitz instead of DirectX/Direct3D/OpenGL? Actually, I use DirectX - I mainly use Blitz for prototyping but I'm finding that for simple to fairly sophisticated things it's all that is needed. For hobbiests and shareware/single member teams Blitz is an ideal way to actually finish something. So, before you knock the book or Blitz - read the book from cover to cover and learn Blitz inside and out, you may be surprised at how much you can do with it. Oh, and get a good IDE - I personally like Protean.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I find some of the reviews quite interesting, since they judge the book based on their opinion of BlitzBasic. Firstly, let me assure you that I have learned a "real" language - I've been a professional software developer for 12 years (C/C++/Delphi/C#). As far as the book goes it is very well written and is aimed at the beginner programmer using BlitzBasic (not Blitz3D but you can still use it). That's it, that's all there is to the book. I still found it useful, however, in quickly picking up BlitzBasic (mostly the language) which allowed me to write 2D games after a day (okay, I've been doing that for years with DX/OpenGL but I'm still impressed that I can write Pong in less than 10 minutes). Why would I use Blitz instead of DirectX/Direct3D/OpenGL? Actually, I use DirectX - I mainly use Blitz for prototyping but I'm finding that for simple to fairly sophisticated things it's all that is needed. For hobbiests and shareware/single member teams Blitz is an ideal way to actually finish something. So, before you knock the book or Blitz - read the book from cover to cover and learn Blitz inside and out, you may be surprised at how much you can do with it. Oh, and get a good IDE - I personally like Protean.
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