Re: Business models

[Joel Utting <joelu.geo@yahoo.com>]

Jan Ekholm wrote:
> 
> 
> What would be a nice thing if it was available is a few books on
> libs like SDL/PLIB that teach you how to do games using those libs. I
> assume game programming books for Linux so far have been more or less
> normal programming books (shell, C/C++, make, etc) with a small added
> appendix saying "hey, there's this OpenGL thing too, and I think you can
> do sound too".
> 
> On Windows if you want to do a game you buy some book called something
> like "DirectX Programming", follow their tutorials and start your project
> by copying one of the more finished samples from the book CD. I don't
> think we have something like that yet? Everyone always has to learn
> everything from scratch, there is no "stored" knowledge yet.

I agree - a lot of libraries have API manuals that are really only for
looking up what functions do and the rest is "read the source" which is
okay for people who already know whats going on. There are a few
tutorials around that mainly seem to be "getting started" guides for
particular libraries, but these seem to be quite sketchy and limited
(from my limited experience).

To be sure, I can do these things, but the way I learn easiest is
through following step by step examples of building a program up from
scratch. The other thing is free game development is different and the
linux development environment (autoconf/automake, things like CVS) are
complicated, but usually you only need to know very little to get what
you want - I tried reading the CVS book and info pages on automake - its
very easy to get lost in that complexity when all you want is to have
the game make and install nicely. 

Come to think of it I should probably write something like this, but I
seem to be always short of time...

Bye - Joel.

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