Being one of the very few books on Allegro game programming, this book is excellent. Mr. Harbour walks you through Allegro using the C programming language. He goes over everything from sound to vertical scrollers to horizontal scrollers to joystick, keyboard, and mouse input. There is TONS of examples in this book. This book, along with the documentation that comes with Allegro is all you will need to make some very awesome games. The games you create are 2D games, which is good (and where I think all beginners should start), so the book stays on topic and gives you everything you need (on CD, or you can download them off the net if you buy a used copy) to create full-featured computer games.