Pro Android Games

This book will be obsolete ~6 months from now after the Android team removes its collective cranium from its collective digestive endpoint in response to the IPhone continuing to clobber it with better games despite the frustratingly unexposed hardware superiority of recent Android phones like the Droid and the Nexus One. And that time will be the moment they release the Android equivalent of DirectX. Interpreted Java without a JIT to back it up crossed with some very limited media APIs just isn't enough to compete with compiled C and a much more robust media API on the IPhone.

And I apologize for the short editorial, but I need it to set the stage for why you should indeed buy this book even though it will soon be irrelevant.

For if you need to write native-level games now, this is the book to buy, now. It's full of typos, it needed another round of proofreading, and it's already dated somewhat by NDK 1.6, but it shows how to get games like Wolf3D and Doom running in C on the Android and it's in print rather than out there on a set of disparate web pages. There's nothing else out there like it at the moment.

5 stars for content as it really does deliver on the goods and 3 stars for coherency and lack of sufficient proofreading.