Holistic Game Development with Unity: An All-in-One Guide to Implementing Game Mechanics, Art, Design and Programming [Kindle Edition]

The cliche "those who can't do, teach" was likely coined by those who could do, but not teach. In the real world, the intersection of ability-to-do and ability-to-teach-it is rare, and the more rare the skill, the exponentially more rare the teacher. Thus decent books on moderately popular topics such as Javascript or Rails are at least not unheard of, but for obscure topics, texts are guaranteed to be written by those who can accomplish the tasks at hand but lack the ability to usefully express their knowledge.

When de Byl referenced Betty Edwards' classic "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," I knew I had found something different. de Byl explains all the logic and process necessary to create and control logic in a game in a clear and forthright manner. Even when the topic turns to those bits of high school math the reader has likely long forgotten, her writing style makes it easy for the reader to get the gist and move on to the mechanics of the task at hand.

She does overpromise a bit when she suggests that her book is equally suitable for both "artists who want to learn how to develop games and programmers who want to learn about using art in games." A better description might have been, "for artistically-inclined programmers and artists with some programming background." She doesn't (and, given the scope of such a book, probably couldn't) provide enough background in basic OOP for a complete novice. I urge those to pick up a book on basic Javascript, learn those basics, and then return to this volume.

Programmers who already have game programming knowledge and simply want an introduction to Unity may find this book slow-moving or obvious. Any of the other books on Unity, which emphasize code and action over theory, would be better suited. For the programmer who has been trying to dig into game programming and Unity but felt lost in the code, here's the book you've been looking for.

This book is perfect, an All-In-One guide indeed. From start to finish, this book is amazing. It contains all the essentials. It's a full course to learn everything you need to, using the UNITY game development platform and uses JavaScript for the coding. The text is easy to follow, understand, and it is very well-explained. There are tons of screenshots and pictures providing examples of what is described in the text. The programming code you need to enter is shown clearly, and you will rarely ever get stuck on any steps. The first chapter is about the art of thinking for game development. The first chapter does an outstanding job of explaining everything you need to know before you start programming. Each of the following chapters does a great job into covering each of the other main parts of developing a game: objects, animation, game rules, characters, player, and environment. The final chapter is a good introduction chapter to develop for mobile devices.

The software platform, Unity, installs easily and quickly, from the website. The accompanying website for the book hosts ten zip files which should be downloaded for the self-learn exercises. The exercises are perfect, each step-by-step, showing the exact text that should appear. This book makes learning game development incredibly easy. It will help beginners get to the intermediate stage easily. Of course it does help if you have some sort of programming experience with any of the higher-level languages (anything beyond BASIC). Good book for intermediate users also, to gain complete knowledge of the topics. Experienced users will probably benefit slightly from this book, but will want something more complex. Highly recommended. 5 stars.

Ever wonder why the sky is blue? What is a fractal? What is a quaternions? How did the creatures in Black and White learn? How does a FPS like Halo make it seem like you have infinite terrain? How is weather in games made? How is physics used in today's 3D games?etc...
Well wonder no more because by the end of this book all of this and more will be answered using theory and accompanied by examples in Unity.
First thing I will say is that this is one of the first technical books I have read cover to cover in a long time. No wonder Unity Technologies endorsed her book. The author has a way of instantly engaging the reader via analogies and real world examples to illustrate her points. By the end of the book she manages to talk about everything from the Matrix to Star Trek! It may seem that she is going off on tangents but by the end of it you realize it was quite brilliant the way she goes about conveying technical information. For example, the book starts off talking about fractals and you're thinking what does that have to do with Unity but that's actually what first attracted me to the book. By the end she makes her point that they are the epitome of both the creative side of programming an algorithmic nature of art. In later chapters we see how fractals are related to Unity via the same algorithmic approaches used to generate terrain, trees, and special effects in Unity via procedural or dynamic generation.
Each chapter after that is just as engaging covering the background theory and design/art considerations. It's obvious the author is a perfectionist since I found less than a handful of errors and that is rare since I usually find many more in any book I read. She is also a stickler for details for example actually pointing out difference in Rayleigh scattering and Mie theory, Persistence of Vision vs Phi theory, etc. which is probably good since it probably made it a better book. Thus she gives one of the best explanations I've ever seen regarding Quaternions and the gimbal lock problem which I had never even heard about.
The author smartly inserts Unity hands on sections throughout to break up the theory though so you actually get to start using all the theory you are learning directly in Unity. You start off with simple enough things like creating a stack of cubes which you can knock down by clicking and generating a ball to knock them down (I remember trying to do something similar in Maya years ago via scripting and never getting it to work) Then you move on to more complicated examples like a 2D space shooter, blowing things up, cloth, waypoints, path finding, Artificial Intelligence, Skydomes, etc. By far my favorite was the procedurally generated city. Way too cool like something out of the Matrix or Inception!
By the end of the book I'm pretty sure the author has pretty much covered everything Unity is capable of or at least given the reader a good idea of why it's so popular and make them want to learn more.
One of downsides I can see in this book is that as someone else stated, the information density per page is pretty intense. It reminds me of the first time I read K&R "The C programming language". Had to back and read it again several times to make sure I didn't miss something. If you were to follow all the thinks she provides on more AI,etc the book would be thousands of pages long. Actually, now I understand why there is no bibliography included in the book since it would be several pages long having found all the references the author used [...]

Still having programmed and made games using C, Java, etc. I found using Javascript with Unity way faster and easier. You are able to accomplish stuff that would take you months in other languages in just hours! Talk about instant gratification.
The book does say it's equally geared toward artist and programmer types but being a programmer myself I would find it hard pressed for someone without any programming experience to get far in this book at least as far as the scripting is concerned. Maybe some artist with at least some Flash experience or something similar. Someone with no programming experience at all will be totally lost by the code examples since they are not explained in enough detail for a beginner. I mean just typing in all the examples into Unity and getting them to work took me several days! It would be nice Unity examples for the completed scene and not just the start was included for download. Oh and there was an error in the Billboard example but the author put an updated file on her website to fix it. Also, in some of the examples, the author states that the programming is better done in C# and doesn't explain any of that code and just assumes you accept it as working. Read bake code so to speak. I did have to resort to watching some Unity video's on the basics like how to move around in the scene, how to move the camera, etc. because it seems the author expects you to know this stuff already. If you don't getting some of the examples to work will be difficult since you won't be able to follow along. In a lot of cases I found the objects in my scene getting lost or the camera not pointing the correct way or objects way too big or too small to see properly. Also, if you are using Unity 3.5 that just came out make sure to comment out the #pragma strict or some of the examples won't run at all and give you cryptic error messages like object doesn't support slicing!
It's obvious the author has used Unity for quite a while from seeing her Lake Louise terrain recreation in Unity. I wasn't able to create anything close to it. You'll definitely want another book on the basics of Unity, to cover more of the basics of scripting or spend some time reading the Unity manual before trying the projects yourself.
In the end this is the best book I've seen to give an high level overview of how to make 3D games in the shortest amount of time and all the theory involved. Basically if you want to show off what is possible with Unity or quickly prototype a 3D game this is the book for you. Just don't expect to understand the scripting behind all the magic. You'll need another book for that. Highly recommended.