I am old school and would much prefer to read books actually. I have a few like Unity in Action, I thought I would ask here as the help here is superior to Google.
I haven’t found any good unity books. They seem to be out of date before they’re published.
As for books, Clean Code is a good read.
I’ll see if I remember more as others pipe in.
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I made the same experience as Michael. When I started with Unity, I bought a few new books just to realise that they were already outdated. Unity releases an update every couple of weeks. No printed book can be up to date.
Books with “universal” knowledge that will very likely not change within the next few months are probably better for learning “coding” in general.
Here is my recommendation:
https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
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I found that website. Along with others.
So the Net is the best place to learn anything tech related? That has been my experience.
Not necessarily. It does come down to you.
Personally I prefer books over videos. C#, .NET and ASP.NET have some amazing books as the core of those things don’t really change so fast, though they do get added features. I found digging deeper into C# and more serious programming really helped.
The problem with tech is you don’t know what you don’t know. Once you know what you don’t know, you can google it. So it’s a combination of talking with peers, tutors (really good for learning exactly what you need and fast), books, videos, courses, product and api documentation, news, reviews but deep down where you learn most is when you dig deep and play with it and googleFu.
Totally agree with @MichaelP and @Nina, books are usually outdated the day they come out, sometimes even online courses are.
There’s a particular topic that it’s kinda hard to be outdated and that a lot of game developers omit, which is kinda hilarious because that’s the base of any game. I’m talking about Game Design. Here’s a list of some books that might help:
- Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
- Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
- The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Schell, there are multiple editions of that book
- The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by many, animation is a huge part of game design, used it incorrectly and your game becomes unplayable.
- Design (Walt Disney Animation Studios The Archive Series), by many, you can learn a lot about level design from this book. Hard to find.
- Layout and Background (Walt Disney Animation Studios The Archive Series), by many, you can learn a lot about level design from this book too. Hard to find.
- Level Design: Concept, Theory, and Practice, by Rudolf Kremers.
And last but not least.
- Game Design foundation: What is a game?, by me. Yes! I’m writing a book, it’ll come out in a few months, it’s going to be digital only and free.
There are many, many more, but I think that would be more than enough to start.
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The content on the website is available for free but if you prefer a book, you could buy the book with the same content. That’s why I linked the website.
So the Net is the best place to learn anything tech related? That has been my experience.
That’s my personal experience, too. However, depending on the subject, I might be interested in a book. If that’s the case, I would do research on the topic and look for recommendations online. A few years ago, I bought a book about C# 6 because the version for C# 5 was online for free, and I liked the explanations. I still use the book to occasionally look up information.
Being able to see the content in advance is another reason why I linked https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ because the author allows you to evaluate his content for free before buying his book. The problem with many other books is that you don’t know the content in advance, and it is impossible to tell in advance if the content is (still) relevant (for you).
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