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Are there good free ebooks on game development? I don't care if they are theoretical or technology specific, I want to start reading one free book that worth it.

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7 Answers

up vote 54 down vote accepted

Game Design

Programming

Art

Culture and Studies

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also you could use www.flazx.com It has lots of ebooks on game development and also on almost every topic in computer science – Vishnu Nov 17 '10 at 9:11
up vote 5 down vote

The Real-Time Rendering website has a good list of free books. They're mostly about writing shaders, including books from the GPU Gems and ShaderX series.

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up vote 4 down vote

The creator of Sirlin Games has posted a great book on-line called Playing To Win. It comes in three forms, a book from Lulu, an e-book from Amazon (not free), and on-line as HTML. So even if it's not a free e-book as in the OP, it's still free to read (and you could download all the HTML pages if you really wanted to read if offline).

It's purely the psychology of competitive game design, no code. Definitely worth reading.

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up vote 4 down vote

I have never read it myself, but I keep seeing it mentioned.

http://inventwithpython.com/

I believe it is mostly text games, but near the end it covers pygame.

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Downvoting because it uses Python 3, which is a horrible language with no support. – Joe Wreschnig Sep 15 '10 at 16:49
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You are downvoting not because it's a bad book, but because in your opinion the language is horrible. Am i missing something? – Cristina Sep 15 '10 at 20:12
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Seriously dude? Python 3 is great. I don't know what you're smoking, but it's giving you brain cancer. – michael.bartnett Dec 3 '10 at 7:01
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Python 3 is not a horrible language. It is just like HTML5; new, but without 3rd party support. It is a great language, and it's really not an issue to change the few parts of the code (like bytes) to Py2.7 compatible. – The Communist Duck Dec 4 '10 at 15:40
up vote 2 down vote

Not a book but an online place to start possibly http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html

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up vote 1 down vote

Action Arcade Adventure Set by Dianna Gruber is a very detailed introduction to game development. Source code for a full-featured 2d side-scrolling game is developed over several chapters. Several more general topics are also covered, like marketing and the history of side-scrolling games.

The book is now freely available online, but here is the Amazon link for reference.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you're looking to do game development for the new Windows Phone 7 Platform there is a Free E-book it covers both Silverlight Development (for Applications [but could be used for games]) and the XNA Game Framework.

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