Unity Game Development Cookbook, 1st Edition
Written by Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jon Manning, and Tim Nugent.
Published by O'Reilly Media, March 2019
Discover how to use the Unity game engine to its full potential for both 3D and 2D game development—from the basics of scripting to useful tricks in gameplay, behavior, and animation. With this problem-solving cookbook, you’ll get started in two ways:
First, you’ll learn about the Unity game engine through brief recipes that teach specific features of the software and scripting systems.
Second, you’ll apply a collection of snippets to address common gameplay scenarios, such as properly keeping score.
Using our cookbook format, we pinpoint the problem, set out the solution, and discuss how to solve your problem in the best and most straightforward way possible. This book is ideal for beginning to intermediate Unity developers.
You’ll find solutions for:
2D and 3D graphics
Math, physics, and character control
Animation and movement
Behavior and AI
Sound and music
Input and gameplay
Scripting and user interface
Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift, 1st Edition
Written by Mars Buttfield-Addison, Paris Buttfield-Addison, Tim Nugent, and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, October 2018
Create and implement AI-based features in your Swift apps for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. With this practical book, programmers and developers of all kinds will find a one-stop shop for AI and machine learning with Swift. Taking a task-based approach, you’ll learn how to build features that use powerful AI features to identify images, make predictions, generate content, recommend things, and more.
AI is increasingly essential for every developer—and you don’t need to be a data scientist or mathematician to take advantage of it in your apps. Explore Swift-based AI and ML techniques for building applications. Learn where and how AI-driven features make sense. Inspect tools such as Apple’s Python-powered Turi Create and Google’s Swift for TensorFlow to train and build models.
I: Fundamentals and Tools—Learn AI basics, our task-based approach, and discover how to build or find a dataset.
II: Task Based AI—Build vision, audio, text, motion, and augmentation-related features; learn how to convert preexisting models.
III: Beyond—Discover the theory behind task-based practice, explore AI and ML methods, and learn how you can build it all from scratch... if you want to.
iOS Swift Game Development Cookbook, 3rd Edition
Written by Jonathon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, October 2018
Ready to create amazing games for iOS? With Apple’s Swift programming language, it’s never been easier. This updated cookbook provides detailed recipes for managing a wide range of common iOS game-development issues, ranging from architecture design to graphics to performance—all revised for the latest version of Swift.
You get simple, direct solutions to common problems found in iOS game programming. Need to figure out how to give objects physical motion, or want a refresher on gaming-related math problems? This book provides sample projects and straightforward answers. All you need to get started is some familiarity with iOS development and Swift.
Lay out your game’s structure and organize its contents
Build your interface and customize menus with UIKit
Design your game to detect and respond to user input
Work with sound effects, music, and speech synthesis
Store and access data for later use with iCloud
Create and animate 2D graphics with SpriteKit
Simulate physics to make game movements feel realistic
Create and render 3D scenes with SceneKit
Test users by designing an AI system that thinks ahead
Add game controllers, external displays, and augmented reality
Learning Swift, 3rd Edition
Written by Jonathon Manning, Paris Buttfield-Addison, and Tim Nugent
Published by O'Reilly Media, March 2018.
Get valuable hands-on experience with Swift, the open source programming language developed by Apple. With this practical guide, skilled programmers with little or no knowledge of Apple development will learn how to code with the latest version of Swift by developing a working iOS app from start to finish.
You’ll begin with Swift programming basics—including guidelines for making your code "Swifty"—and learn how to work with Xcode and its built-in Interface Builder. Then you’ll dive step-by-step into building and customizing a basic app for taking, editing, and deleting selfies. You’ll also tune and test the app for performance and manage the app’s presence in the App Store.
Divided into four parts, this book includes:
Swift 4 basics: Learn Swift’s basic building blocks and the features of object-oriented development
Building the Selfiegram app: Build model objects and the UI for your selfie app and add location support, user settings, and notifications
Polishing Selfiegram: Create a theme and support for sharing and add custom views, image overlays, and localization
Beyond app development: Debug and performance test with Xcode, automate chores with Fastlane, and user-test the app with TestFlight
Xcode 9, iOS 11, macOS 10.13, Swift 4, and above.
The Kerbal Player's Guide
Written by Dr Jon Manning, Tim Nugent, Paul Fenwick, Dr Alasdair Allan, and Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, November 2016.
Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a critically acclaimed, bestselling space flight simulator game. It’s making waves everywhere from mainstream media to the actual space flight industry, but it has a bit of a learning curve. In this book, five KSP nerds—including an astrophysicist—teach you everything you need to know to get a nation of tiny green people into space.
KSP is incredibly realistic. When running your space program, you’ll have to consider delta-V budgets, orbital mechanics, Hohmann transfers, and more. This book is perfect for video game players, simulation game players, Minecrafters, and amateur astronomers.
Design, launch, and fly interplanetary rockets
Capture an asteroid and fly it into a parking orbit
Travel to distant planets and plant a flag
Build a moon rover, and jump off a crater ridge
Rescue a crew-mate trapped in deep space
Mobile Game Development with Unity
Written by Jon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, 2017.
Learn how to build games that work on several mobile devices, including phones and tablets powered by iOS and Android. This practical book shows you how to get started with the Unity game development ecosystem for creating beautiful, interactive 3D and 2D content.
You’ll get a top-to-bottom overview of Unity’s features—including its game engine, integrated development environment (IDE), and ready-made assets—with specific, project-oriented guidance on how to use those features in real games that will hook and delight players on any mobile platform.
Learning Swift, 1st Edition
Written by Jonathon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, September 2015.
Get a thorough, hands-on exploration of Apple's Swift programming language. With this practical guide, you'll learn how to write Swift code and examine why this language works the way it does. You’ll build three complete apps, all tightly linked together: an iOS note-taking app, its OS X counterpart that uses iCloud to sync data, and an app for the Apple Watch that makes the user’s data available at a moment’s notice.
This book also explains how Swift works in the wider world, including how to use your apps with open-source frameworks, how to use extensions to help your app play nicely with other apps, and how to take the language beyond Apple’s domain with open-source Swift tools. Get started with Swift today and quickly learn how you can build on its foundations.
Xcode 7, iOS 9, watch OS 2, and OS X 10.11 and above.
Swift Development for the Apple Watch
Written by Jonathon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, April 2015 (Early Release)
Take advantage of this unique opportunity to write for a brand new platform and get your apps noticed. This book is a short guide that introduces developers to building apps for the Apple Watch using Apple's newest language, Swift. It covers the WatchKit framework, glances, and notifications.
watch OS 2.0 and above, and iOS 9 and above.
iOS Game Development Cookbook, 2nd Edition
Written by Jonathon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, May 2015
Want to build games with iOS technologies? This cookbook provides detailed recipes for a wide range of common iOS game-development issues, ranging from 2D and 3D math to Game Center integration, and OpenGL to performance. If you’re familiar with iOS and Swift, this is the problem-solving guide you want.
This book targets Swift 1.2, but requires minimal changes for Swift 2.0 and iOS 9. Sample code and changelog is available for Swift 2.0 and iOS 9.
Sample code on GitHub / O'Reilly product page / Amazon
Swift Development with Cocoa, 1st Edition
Written by Jon Manning, Paris Buttfield-Addison, and Tim Nugent
Published by O'Reilly Media, December 2014
This practical guide teaches programmers how to build applications for Mac OS X and iOS 8, using the Cocoa Framework, the new Xcode IDE, and Swift—Apple’s new programming language. You’ll quickly learn the basics for building Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps with Swift and Cocoa/CocoaTouch.
Video training is also available: Ultimate Swift Programming.
This book targets Swift 1.0 and 1.2. Sample code and a changelog is available for Swift 2.0.
Sample code on GitHub / O'Reilly product page / Amazon / Safari
iOS Game Development Cookbook, 1st Edition
Out of Print
Written by Jonathon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by O'Reilly Media, April 2014.
Want to build games with iOS technologies? This cookbook provides detailed recipes for a wide range of common iOS game-development issues, ranging from 2D and 3D math to Game Center integration, and OpenGL to performance. If you’re familiar with iOS and Objective-C, this is the problem-solving guide you want.
This book covers Objective-C. It is still valid for using Objective-C with iOS 9 and Xcode 7.
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 4th Edition
Written by Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jonathon Manning, and Tim Nugent.
Published by O'Reilly Media, March 2014.
For existing programmers to get up to speed on Cocoa and Objective-C, and start developing applications on the iOS 7+ and OS X 10.9+ platforms. From object-oriented programming to storing app data in iCloud, the fourth edition of this book covers everything you need to build apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 3rd Edition
Out of Print
Written by Paris Buttfield-Addison and Jonathon Manning.
Published by O'Reilly Media, December 2012.
Get up to speed on Cocoa and Objective-C, and start developing applications on the iOS and OS X platforms. If you don’t have experience with Apple’s developer tools, no problem! From object-oriented programming to storing app data in iCloud, this book covers everything you need to build apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
iPhone & iPad Game Development For Dummies
Out of Print
Written by Neal Goldstein, Jonathon Manning, and Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., November 2010.
Written for the iOS 3 and iOS 4 era, this book covered game development using Apple's frameworks. It's now woefully out of date, but was fun to write.