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Author Topic: SFML books - reading order?  (Read 2070 times)

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bolbozaur

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SFML books - reading order?
« on: December 12, 2019, 10:36:19 pm »
What should be the "reading" order of these books?

All of them share the same publisher:
- SFML Essentials (Milcho G. Milchev)
- SFML Blueprints (Maxime Barbier)
- SFML Game Development By Example (Raimondas Pupius)
- SFML Game Development (Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller)

I suspect there's no just one correct answer, hence I am looking for a general advice.

Assume:
- solid general programming fundamentals (structural, oop, web, low level, data structures, etc.)
- no (or very basic) game programming experience
- no (or very basic) SFML programming experience

fallahn

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Re: SFML books - reading order?
« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2019, 11:20:14 pm »
FWIW the first book I read was SFML Game Development (Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller) and I found it easy to understand and overall an enjoyable experience. It covered an entire project from start to finish and was the first book that really helped me understand how SFML was designed to be used. I've also tried reading SFML Essentials (Milcho G. Milchev) and SFML Game Development By Example (Raimondas Pupius), although, to me, they felt slightly less well structured and used programming syntax/conventions which I found hard to digest - although I admit some of that may be due to personal coding preference. As a secondary/supporting book I'd actually recommend Game Programming Patterns (Robert Nystrom) as I found it accessible and a good reference for implementing my own ideas when trying to extend what I'd learned from SFML Game Development. https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

NGM88

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Re: SFML books - reading order?
« Reply #2 on: December 29, 2019, 04:59:22 am »
I suggest reading SFML Game Development ONLY, and none of the others. I unfortunately read SFML Essentials first back when I was a C++ novice and encountered many problems because of the singleton resource manager the author used. I skimmed through Blueprints (did not buy it) and I remember thinking that the code in that book was a mess. I'm not familiar with SFML Game Development By Example.

SFML Game Development is all you need to learn SFML with the best coding practices.