A review by diomuller
Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom

5.0

Very good book on Design Patterns for Games. If you are a game developer, you probably know and use a few, if not most of those patterns already. However, the author explains quite a few use cases, optimizations, and reasons why it's better to use one pattern instead of another, depending on what tradeoffs you can accept. Not only that, but the author favors showing things by example, step by step, with a lot of humor in-between, which works better in this case than just dumping a lot of theory at the reader and showing one example or two. Oh, while the focus is on game development, most of the designs in this book are also useful for other types of applications.

Even if you know a bit about Game Programming, I feel this is a good read - it's not a long book, and you may learn a few things. Some of the most useful lessons on this book are not when to use a pattern or when to do something, but when NOT to use a certain pattern or when it's not worth doing some optimization, heavy change or something like that. I feel most programmers could benefit from learning a bit about that too.