Beginner's Guide to Game Animation Programming

Well worth picking up if you already have the basics.

I was looking for something that would bridge the gap between tutorials and proper reference material, and this does that well. The explanations are careful without being condescending, which is a difficult balance to strike. The author avoids over-explaining, which keeps the pace up but means you need to pay attention. Four stars, and I suspect a second edition could easily push it to five.

Genuinely excellent — I finished it in a week and immediately started again.

I came to this book already familiar with the basics, and it still had plenty to offer. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. The balance between theory and practice is well judged; neither side dominates. Worth the money and the reading time, without hesitation.

Finally, a book that treats game development with the care it deserves.

I read this over a couple of weekends alongside a small side project, which turned out to be the ideal way to approach it. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. The progression from chapter to chapter is well thought out; nothing feels out of order. This is the book I wish had existed when I started working with game development.