Very easy to follow, moves at a good pace and covers all the essentials. Love it would happily recommend it if you want a book which will let you jump right into programming

The one thing this book lacks is comment lines on the program examples. I am a great believer in these because, unlike the evaluation of the programs, they give you a very good set of clues as to what each line or block of code is to do with. Other than that, I have enjoyed working though it and it has helped in making my learning curve less steep.

Anyone interested in Pygame or PyOpenGL should 1) get Python and Pygame and 2) get this book. The book is subtitled "From Novice to Professional" and I think is a fair description. Novice is not the same as absolute beginner and it assumes that you will be able to get Python and Pygame setup on you computer whether it be Windows, Mac or Linux which shouldn't be a problem to anyone who can use Google.

The book is just over 300 pages long, which is not huge and daunting, but it manages to pack a lot in. It's concise but never becomes terse and cryptic and covers a wide range of topics, the major topics in the book are 2D and 3D graphics with other chapters on user input, game AI and sound. There are excellent example programs all of which can be downloaded from the publishers website. Keeping with the open source spirit, the author directs the reader to lots of free software and resources to aid their software development.

Finally, one I thing I really have to commend Will McGugan for is how easy he has made dealing with some of the unavoidable mathematics involved in all advanced graphics. It's easy to get a migraine just at the mention of vectors and matrices, but he manages to give you the tools to make use them without having to delve below the surface of mathematical theory.

Without doubt, this book should be on the shelf of any Pygame developer. I'm sure there are things in it that would be of use to most advanced Pygame and PyOpenGL developers.

This book about Pygame do not cover - or even mention - the many collide functions of Pygame, essensially for really many games.

Many other vital issues are also absent.

The book is completely inadequate and doesn't live up to it's title.

Great book!! Don't pay attention to the other negative reviews. 1st I would like to point out, is this is a book on the Pygame library. To get the most out of this book, learn basic python first! This book will teach you how to use the library to create 2d games. This is a book for anyone looking to start into game development. you will not make AAA games with this library. I know Python and am using this book as a reference to create atari-like games as a hobby, maybe upload to itch.io. This book will not teach you how to make sprites, you can use different editors and youtube for those. The game creation starts in your head, then paper, then code. This book will teach you how to create a screen and draw an image to the screen. move sprites via keyboard mouse, and joystick, add sound, collision. Knowing Python you can add other things outside of Pygame like save and load, high score data, and how to upload to itch.io. This book is great again for anyone wanting to create nice 2d games as a hobby or as a indie developer. There is some procedural coding as well as OOP coding. But again learn it first before getting this book as this book assumes you know OOP. I also got the 2nd edition since it uses the latest Pygame version. Both books are great!! UPDATE!! Also keep in mind this book was published oct 2007 the version of Python at that time was 2.5 and Pygame 1.7.1!! big change from todays versions! Keep that in mind!! the second edition of this book released in 2015 covers python 3.4 and pygame was 1.9.x, today is 2026 and the newest python ver is 3.14x and pygame 2.6.1! older books use older versions and may not work with todays versions!! The second ver of this book should be ok with python 3.

私は英語はほとんどダメですが。この本は基本的には中学生英語程度でそこそこ内容を理解することができました。

Pythonをこれから勉強しようと思う程度の知識ですが、他のPython関連の入門書が２〜３冊あればこの本を片手にPygameを始めることができると思います。

ピコピコゲーム作りを通じてプログラミングの勉強をするにもPython+Pygameは良い素材だと思います。この本はゲーム作りに必要なことは一通り描いてあります。やや、3Dポリゴンの説明が消化不良かなという感じもしますが、私が3Dの知識に乏しいからかもしれません。

価格が少々高めですが、入門書としてはちょうどよい難易度、読みやすい英語、他にPygameの開発書がない　点から星５にしました。

余談ですが、なぜか本文中の変数名やファイル名にFuguとかSashimiが使われて、著者が日本びいきなのか知りませんが、日本人はほほ笑ましい感じもしました。

Good book with a lot of neat tricks in programming!

I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from buying this book if you are interested in game programming with Python. Other than it being (I think) the only book out there on this topic, it's a pretty good and well-written book that will introduce you to a lot of material.

However, I do agree with some of the complaints from Craig Obrien's review. You can't run many of the sample programs without the author's gameobjects library. A couple of things this library does involves vectors and matrices, but I'm not sure why we weren't told about something like NumPy, which, while more complicated, allows advanced math computations like this. In other words, something that is not only pre-existing, but a standard in the Python world.

There is also at least one program later in the book that requires the win32gui and win32con modules to run, but this is not mentioned in the book, so unless you open up the code and investigate why the program won't run, you'll never know. What's even more perplexing is that the downloadable code sample that requires these extra modules is not the same code that is printed in the book, which *doesn't* require the modules. So there's misleading code in the book, and then code available to download that won't run.

One thing I enjoyed about the book was how in-depth it got concerning vectors. I love to know exactly how things are working, and it helped to read about all this. Ironically, when the discussion of matrices began in the section on 3D gaming, the author seemed to take the exact opposite approach. Instead of giving us a decent analysis of matrices and how they work, he more or less glosses over them and basically says "Don't worry, just use the gameobjects module." This I don't like, because I hate writing code that I don't understand, even if it ends up working fine. I re-read this section and still didn't understand the difference between "transformation" and "translation". I feel much of this topic wasn't given its due, and considering that 3D game programming is what many of us want to do, it's pretty important we learn this stuff, no matter how dry it might be at first. Simply having a bunch of functions and code thrown at you with the attitude of "Ignore all this, we just need it in there so the game works" is certainly no way to learn. In other words, the difficulty level of the material sky-rocketed in a hurry, and I felt left behind by most of the explanations in the second half of the book, particularly beginning with 3D gaming.

Concerning, the other reviewer's criticism of the first two chapters, I do agree with him to some extent. Personally, I've been away from Python for a while and those chapters *did* serve as a refresher, but overall I feel the space could have been better used to expand on the other topics, at the very least. Let's face it, no one is going to learn Python from those two chapters, and if you need to be refreshed, use the books you learned it from to begin with.

All in all, though, it's a worthwhile book to read. You will learn a lot of details about the making of games. It's just that there came a point where I felt like I lost my handle on the material. Part of that could be my own fault, but I enjoy math so it isn't simply that I lost interest, it's just that I feel like the more advanced topics were glossed over more than the topics earlier in the book.

This is a beginner book for someone wanting to learn how to use Pygame with Python. A more advanced person will see that SDL is really what's at play here. So if your coming from a C++ and SDL gaming background, this book is a breeze and will get you doing the same kind of games using Python.

This book is not about teaching how libraries are made, or what's going on under the hood. The reader just makes calls to the libraries, if needed, for his or her game project.

Anyway, an excellent book. Been learning about Finite State Machines, which this book helped a lot in. The FSM for the ants and spiders is one of the best examples I've seen for learning FSM.

I recommend buying the Second Edition of this book. It's been updated for Python 3 programming.