Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook by Nathan Burba
Summary: Cooking Cocos
Cocos2d for iPhone is a typical cookbook. That means you will find here lots of recipes useful during iPhone development. Book is well structured. Each chapter is devoted to different aspect of development. There are topics covering basic topics like simple graphics manipulation but also cover physics related ones. One remark here. Not all topics are strictly related to Cocos2d. It can be slightly misleading by tittle that implies Cocos2d library will be discussed in the book. For example JSON, XML and PLIST are covered by TouchJSON, GDataXML and Cocoa libraries respectively. The same refers to SQLite related topics. You could argue whether this kind of topics should be put into book devoted to Cocos2d – no matter what, tittle suggests it is strictly graphics related. On the other hand, maybe it can be useful as sooner or later you will face these issues during game development.
What I liked about the book? The structure of the recipes. They are nearly identical and you always know what to expect. At first, you get the description of the problem, how to prepare the environment, and eventually how to code the solution. There is also an explanation of how and why everything works. From time to time you will also find “there is more” section that points to valuable resources.
What I didn’t like? I think there are too much source code in the book. I know it is easier to read when you have the code in front of you, but I am pretty sure that most of the people will use the book together with their laptops and XCode running aside. So, in my opinion, basing on example source codes would be just fine. And the book would occupy less place on the book shelf.
Anyway, I think it is worth considering to by this book (at least e-book format) just to have some nice recipes by you hand. Not all of them are applicable in each case, but still, they cover quite a loot of topics.
Product page:
Packt: http://www.packtpub.com/cocos2d-for-iphone-1-game-development-cookbook/book
Amazon (in Books): Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook
Amazon (Kindle): Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook
