David M. Bourg, Physics for Game Developers (O'Reilly, 2002)



It seems to me that when you're confronted with a book title like Physics for Game Developers, you see an undercurrent of "rocks for jocks" in that. It implies that this is physics for folks who never glommed onto physics. As someone who never got above a C in any science class after Biology I in tenth grade, then, it would seem to be right up my alley. Not so. The first five chapters of the book will kill you if you're not familiar with various forms of scientific notation. (Know your Greek letters!) It doesn't help that Bourg has overloaded a few common operators for his own means (for example, he uses * for dot product and ^ for conjunction, when coders will be used to seeing those to symbols used for multiplication and exponentiation respectively). That said, however, once you get past the first five "refresher" chapters, the book picks up a good deal. There's code! And once Bourg is describing what code does, rather than attempting to impart more abstract (well, okay, "abstract" is not the right word, but hopefully you know what I'm getting at), his language becomes a great deal clearer, at least to those of us who think in code rather than physics. Worth picking up if you're in the market for this sort of book, but you might want to pick up a copy of Physics for Dummies to help you through the first part. ***