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Speaking of books, today I accidentally found an interesting book named “Developing Games In Java”.
Covers quite a lot of topics, see: http://www.booksmatter.com/b1592730051.htm.
I ordered it today from Amazon for 32$. Anyone else has bought the book?
Its been bandied about here. I guess consensus is its the best Java specific game book out there currently.
The TOC really looks promising.
Somebody here read it?
The “Thinking in Patterns” book-in-progress by the ‘thinking in java’ guy is a very accessible intro to design patterns.
Okay… this is a religious question… realizing that, here’s MY religion…
I am NOT a big believer in “methodologies.” I’ve been coding a long time and seen a lot of methodologies coem and go. Mostly what they introduce are new buzz words for managers to talk about and people with no real experience to put on their resumes.
Coding is as much art as science and elegence is something you know "by feel’ as much as anything else.
Having said that, I’ll add this:
The two most important classes I had in college were Data Structures and machine Organization. Data Structures and structured programming taught me how to think of my code as functional units. Those lessons are as applicable in OOPLs today as they ever were. (An object == a Data Stucture at the end of the day.)
Machine Organization changed my understanding of the computer. Rather then being a magic black box into which I fed incatations and out of which came results, i learned exactly how the machien works from the gates on up. Among other things, a good Machine Organization class will break you of any temptation to ever write monoloithic code again.
FOr machien organization I rcommend Tannenbaum’s book. Its a classic and still applies. For data structure there are lots of good boosk out there, just make sure its a book tha teaches data structure theory and not just a catalog of pre-implemented structures.
I went through that book. It has some useful imga and event stuff. The timming and animation loop parts are ok. They admit the currentTimeMillis() is off and state that it will be fixed in 1.5. There is also typic networking and custom gui stuff in there that is also useful.
There is another book by the same publisher which I found a lot more useful than that one. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2W9CERBSKN&isbn=0131020099&itm=8 this book has a bunch of good material. My favorite part was the animation loop similar to the one used in the SNES Zelda game. The code examples are not windows API specific, which is really good since you can adapt them to your program easily. But do like I did and just go to your local Barnes and Noble and read though it before you buy it. I will be honest, I didn’t buy it. But I have sat in BN for hours copying examples and text to my notebook several times.
‘Writing Solid Code’ by Steve Maguire, published by Microsoft. ISBN 1-55615-551-4
Its C-centric, but a lot of useful tips & anecdotes about writing, err well, solid code 
Its more to do with avoiding bugs, both code wise & design wise. It was given to every programmer at the last place I worked, though sadly not all of them read it.
- Dom
[quote]FOr machien organization I rcommend Tannenbaum’s book.
[/quote]
Tanenbaum’s books are recommended in the courses at my university, too. One of the main advantages is, that the books are easy to read and never boring.