★★★★★ 3
Solid, albeit abbreviated, coverage of Godot Game Engine 3.0
Format: Paperback
Solid introduction to Godot. Lightly touches on most topics, enough to get you up to speed an moving with it, though I personally would prefer a book that included much more depth on each area covered. Granted that wouldn't be a Sams "in 24 hours" book, but rather more of a "definitive guide" or "bible" which this is not. There's definitely enough meat to sink your teeth into, and being the first (and presently only) available book, it's worth the price.
Aside from content, docking one star for difficult to read glossy pages and light weight fonts in code samples... It's difficult to find a good angle to read the book without glare across the page from a light and my middle-aged eyes struggle a bit with the code samples.
UPDATE -- I've decided I have to dock another star. While the book is written in English, its authors are not native english speakers. It seems a better job could have been done with editing and review. There are a lot of clunky sentences, and several instances where the instruction is unclear.
A small example:
"A trick to add a simple outline is to add a new material to the Next Pass property. In this new material, set it to Unshaded, add a Grow of 0.01, change the Cull mode to front, and set its color to black."
For someone familiar with all the various groupings of properties in a spatial material node, that might be all the information needed, but this book is (I thought) aimed at people with less experience with the framework. Those handful of properties are scattered throughout several groups of properties, and in the case of grow, there's only a field to enter a value when you've clicked a checkbox first. This may be a minor thing, and one could probably make the argument that materials were covered a couple chapters prior -- though that section doesn't really mention all of these properties... Lots of little assumptions and oversights like that make the learning process a little more frustrating that it could be.
The information that's there is still great, but if you have little or no experience with Godot, expect to have to do some extra legwork to fill in some gaps on your own.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2018