Retro Web-Based Game Programming

A superb guide. The examples are small but complete.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. A couple of chapters felt like they could have been merged, but that is a minor complaint. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. I found myself making notes in the margins, which is always a good sign. An easy five stars from me. I look forward to whatever the author writes next.

Strong content, uneven pacing. I would still recommend it.

I bought this on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a forum thread, and I am glad I did. It is denser than the page count suggests, and I found myself slowing down around the middle. A few of the examples could be more realistic, but the underlying points come across clearly. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

Not for me. The pacing did not work and I struggled to finish it.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. Two stars. The subject deserves a better treatment than this.