Review: Game Programming Patterns
A book by Robert Nystrom
This book was published in 2014. It lists 19 programming patterns that can be used in and outside game-related code. For each, the book explains what issue(s) a pattern addresses, how it works (including some code examples and diagrams), potential use cases, and when not to use it. In the author’s own words:
I started writing this book while working at Electronic Arts. In my eight years there, I saw a lot of beautiful code, and a lot of not-so-beautiful code. My hope was that I could take what I learned from the good stuff, write it down here, and then teach it to the people writing the awful stuff.
Since I started working in tech some 7 or so years ago, this book has helped me write smarter code on a couple of occasions. Some of the patterns are what you might call timeless — Those are often the more general, less game-specific ones. Others, while still important and heavily used nowadays, have arguably become less relevant to the wider software engineering audience. The book is well written and explains complicated structures in easy and instructive ways. IMHO the book has overall aged quite well. It’s a good read and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to better understand some approaches to common (albeit complicated) problems software developers face.
