Unity in Action, Third Edition: Multiplatform game development in C#

It's good!

I was a complete beginner in November 2021 and since then I have had my fair share of books, bootcamps, professional certificate programs, udemy courses and youtube tutorials to learn Unity. From the beginners perspective I see two issues with most courses : 1. material getting out of date due to the fast way Unity changes and 2. the courses not having the right structure. It was challenging to find something that was easy to follow, structured and simply worked with the latest Unity iterations, until this book. Main reason I got it was the positive reviews on reddit and the fact that the course material was updated with one of the more recent versions of Unity. Code is clean, concise and works. The github repository is up to date and no discrepancies with the text. Compared to online resources such as youtube who go at blazing speed trying to teach you the code aspect, book format offers you the ability to set your own pace, which I found to be very useful in learning a new coding language or platform like Unity. The structuring is also great, going from simple to complex, from 2d/3d environment creation to 1st person 3rd person movement and animation, to UI design, everything is covered in a nice, lean way. Now I have a little library of code which I can use for my own projects thanks to this book. Overall, as a new, aspiring Unity developer, I can definitely recommend this product to those who are just starting like me.

Decent book. I, myself, don't do too well with just following along with a book step by step as these "In Action" books do. But it's great, if that's how you learn best.

I'm still in the early days of learning but reading this is a genuine pleasure

This book presents an excellent introduction to Unity and C# scripting. It is detailed and easy to follow. Students come out very comfortable by the end of the semester. I give the students the option of either using Unity Learn video tutorials or Unity in Action, many opt for Unity in Action.

I am a academic teacher. I used this book as an introductory book for my students and the resulting thesis were perfect. The book is an excelllent startup for building a game programmatically and also provides the links to sources of related game development aspects. I also confirm from my personal reading experience that the book is very well structures and readable. I hope the author to proceed for a 4th edition

I am a long-time computer programmer who has always been fascinated with computer graphics and video games. My career has been in other areas of application development, but I still enjoy learning how to create games using both 2D and 3D platforms. I was fortunate to have been invited to participate in the pre-publication review process for this book, and I found it to be an excellent introduction to Unity. The author takes the reader on a journey through the Unity environment by presenting sample projects in each chapter. Diagrams and screenshots guide the reader through completing these projects -- a great help since the Unity environment is so full of options and settings for various in-game elements. At the end of each chapter, the reader has a playable, albeit simple, game that exercises the core concepts presented in the text. Many chapters extend the applications from previous ones, so the reader has the chance to learn new skills through successive refinement. This approach allows the reader to continue to practice and apply previously learned skills and techniques while incorporating new concepts. The author covers nearly every aspect of game development and how to do it in Unity. Models, textures, animated sequences, lighting, backgrounds, sound effects, and even consuming data from external sources -- its all there. Also, the author addresses both 2D and 3D (even combining the two to implement certain features). If you want to learn to use Unity to develop your own 2D and 3D games, this is a great first step!

This isn’t a review of the content of the book, since I haven’t gone through it yet. This is a review of the quality of the product I received. The book arrived with, along with other signs of wear, some gunky residue on the cover. Not sure if that’s a sign of it being used or something else. It’s definitely a cosmetic thing, but not what I’d expect for paying full price for a new book, unfortunately.

It's an awesome resource to understand fundamentals of game programming, I have to say this book require and assume you've already familiar at least one programming language and this is understandable. I really liked this book because it's build knowledge in every new chapter by iterating the existing work, and you're really understand all crucial concepts like movement, raycasting, collision detection etc. I'd really recommend this book for those who are looking a way to dive in to game programming with web or other programming experience and if you want to get most benefit, try to write all codes in all sections by yourself and see the result.

As orderd...

Bought this book after checking its age (2022/23), hoping it was still current. However, the project used in the book uses methods that have been replaced by newer ones, and so, if you use the book to learn programming in Unity, you learn redundant methodologies on a discontinued version of the framework. So it may give you insights into using Unity, but you will not be future-proof.