Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials Paperback – December 20, 2011

I'm not a programming noob, I've been doing it for 20 years and have a BS in Comp. Sci, as well as experience with various coding languages.However, that experience has mostly not been in game design/development, and it always helps to have a guide for any new tool... just like I also definitely recommend books and tutorials for learning the various art tools you will also need for game development; I use 3DS Max and Blender. No way I could just "jump right in" and start using those, and I wouldn't recommend trying to just jump right in and start using Unity, either.In that regard, this book is perfect. The language, the pacing, the examples, and the modular method of introducing the tools and workflow by gradually building the different parts of a game = perfect for a novice. Unfortunately, there are some chapters that try to introduce coding/scripting concepts in general; I cannot speak to whether those parts are easy enough to understand for someone who has no programming experience or training. I get the impression they would still be confusing for a complete rookie, whereas to me it just bogged things down; I didn't want to skip entire segments, because I still wanted to know specifically how the scripting workflow works... but being beat over the head with bare-basics in the process made it very slow-going, and I ended up trying to skim as much as possible to just grab the bits I needed (basically, I looked for the code boxes and ignored the analysis/explanation of it all)That is my only complaint, but it's a small one -- might be very useful to someone who has never coded, but I have a feeling the basic concepts of scripting and programming in general will be quite a brain-teaser to someone who knows nothing about it... maybe not. I guess it depends on how well your brain grasps the logic and systematic nature of coding.But if you really want to jump headfirst into Unity as quickly as possible, BUY THIS BOOK* Then you can supplement it with some others (I bought "3.x Game Development By Example" as well, and it's also good and very similar, but this one is better laid-out and more thorough in its ability to give you an underlying grasp of the workflow and functionality.)* Unity 4.x is different than 3.x, and has some significant changes. However, most of the changes in the interface and workflow are pretty minor -- I was able to figure things out well enough, other than the fact that Particles are done pretty differently now...

I’ve been keeping tabs on Unity since back when it was a Mac only thing, and it sure has come a long way over the years. Even though I have downloaded and toyed with the program before, I hadn’t took the time to read a proper book on the engine. Now that I am having to work with Unity more for the job, I figured it was a good time to brush up on some knowledge. Although there are tons of Unity books out there, Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials seemed to have good reviews, and the price was right (only $16 for the Kindle e-book).The book basically walks you through creating a dirt simple “game”, that you build up throughout the reading. Only the first chapter has a standalone demo to get your feet wet, the rest of the book is all one project. I found this format to work nicely, as you can concentrate on one aspect of the game design during each chapter but feel more accomplished as you built up the game. It covers creating a terrain, setting up a player controller, importing models, creating a GUI, collision detection, basic scripting to trigger events, and basically everything you would need for a simple demo. Although the game you build will not win any awards, it is functional and teaches some fundamental concepts.What I will say is that the author did a bang-up job with the source code listings. There are tons of code snippets throughout the book and I found only one, yes one, mistake out of the whole thing. And, even then, it was a minor variable misnaming. Nothing major. This was a refreshing surprise, as many programming books are riddled with errors and non-compiling code. Bravo for that.In general, though, I found this to be a very approachable book, even for a beginner. Of course, development experience doesn’t hurt, but it’s really not required for this text. The author clearly explains everything that is taught in the book and only at the end is some code glossed over (since it was already covered). I also liked how all the code is shown in both C# and Javascript, so the choice of language is up to the reader. Very nice.The greatest part, I would say, is how far you can go with Unity itself in little time. I read this book in just one week and feel like I have covered more ground than I have with other engines spending *far* more time learning. So that just goes to show how solid the engine is. It’s not so much about the graphics of the engine, as it doesn’t really look any better than anything else out there. However the editor is very functional and very efficient. Especially nice is how you can create references to objects in the editor, greatly simplifying communication between different components. Overall I found it to be a great learning experience.If you are just starting out with game development then this book is a great resource for learning the Unity engine. If you are already a developer but not familiar with Unity, this is also a great text. Granted, its not a very advanced book, so if you are already using Unity you can probably pass on it. That said, the book was very affordable and well worth the money in my opinion.