Player Experience Design in 20 Minutes (Coffee Break Series)

Solid and well-organised. A couple of chapters dragged a little.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. Solid, and I would buy another book from this author without hesitation.

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

I was looking for something that would bridge the gap between tutorials and proper reference material, and this does that well. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.

Decent, but uneven. Some chapters are much stronger than others.

I picked this up after getting stuck on a project and it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. I found myself making notes in the margins, which is always a good sign. Fine, but there are stronger books on the same subject if you look around.