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Game Programming for Teens, 3rd Edition (FBLA - All)

Maneesh Sethi · 3 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Game Programming for Teens, 3rd Edition (FBLA - All)" by Maneesh Sethi.
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Amazon Summary
Do you enjoy playing video games and want to learn how to create your own? "Game Programming for Teens, Third Edition" shows you how to design and develop a complete video game from start to finish, no prior programming knowledge required. You'll begin by learning the basics of BlitzMax, a simple cross-platform game programming language that can be used on Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. Once you understand how to write the programming code, you'll begin to incorporate all the graphical elements of games including varying colors, loading and displaying images, and creating scrolling backgrounds. Finally, you�ll learn how to add sound and music, use keyboard input codes, and even integrate artificial intelligence. New skills are taught step-by-step, and each chapter builds upon the techniques you learned in the previous, so by the end of the book you'll have built your very own fully functioning video game. And the CD-ROM contains all the source code, art and sound files, and demo versions of BlitzMax and the other programs used in the book. So don�t just play video games, build your own, with "Game Programming for Teens, Third Edition!"
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
This advice is good or bad depending on the style of your nephew. If he is really exciting about programming, then he most likely has in his head this idea of hacking away at physical lines of code rather than Alice/Squeak/Scratch.

I'd suggest BlitzBasic in companion to the fantastic book Game Programming for Teens (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598635182/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...). Blitz is cross platform, extremely easy to dive into, and has a great graphics library. Or, if you want to start him out pure, I'd suggest python/pygame.

Ahh---sorry for the self-promotion but I really believe what I am saying: I wrote a book called Game Programming for Teens, which teenagers tend to like because it teaches them to make video games off the bat (using a modified version of BASIC), gets them interested in programming, and then helps them move on to learning more difficult languages b/c they already have some programming concepts down. The book is here http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Teens-Maneesh-Sethi/d...
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Dec 27, 2008 · maneesh on Ask HN: Classic games?
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Teens-Maneesh-Sethi/d...

I even had a tv show about teaching game programming back when I was 15 yrs old, on TechTV's call for help: http://www.courseptr.com/gamedev/maneeshsethitechtv.mpg

Good times---book was a bestseller and translated into like 5 languages. Good times for a 14 yr-old :)

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