Preface.  

'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I - I hardly know, sir, just at present - at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by John Tenniel.

Who Are You?

I hardly know, but I'll make a guess. You're a programmer who wants to apply your abilities to 2D, 3D, and network games programming, either for entertainment or as the first step in becoming a games programming professional. You want to write a game that uses the latest Java technology, not an applet showing a penguin waving its flipper.

You've already done an introductory course on Java - been there done that. So you understand about classes, objects, inheritance, exception handling, threads, and basic graphics. But you need information about more advanced stuff like the APIs for Java 2D, Java Sound, networking, and Java 3D.

You're probably most interested in multiplayer 3D games programming, because they're the coolest. They are hard to code, but this book will get you up to speed on how to build one.

You don't want to reinvent the wheel - Java is about abstraction, information hiding, and reuse. That translates into building games with existing libraries/classes/tools.

Other sections in the preface: 'What this Book is About', 'What this Book is Not About', and 'Comparisons with Other Java Gaming Texts'.

Downloads

• The PDF file for the draft preface (153 KB). Last updated: 26th July 2004.

• Up to the Killer Game Programming in Java Index Page
• On to Chapter 1. Why Java for Games Programming?