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Book Description

To even try to keep pace with the rapid evolution of game development, you need a strong foundation in core programming techniques-not a hefty volume on one narrow topic or one that devotes itself to API-specific implementations. Finally, there’s a guide that delivers! As a professor at the Spanish university that offered that country’s first master’s degree in video game creation, author Daniel Sanchez-Crespo recognizes that there’s a core programming curriculum every game designer should be well versed in-and he’s outlined it in these pages! By focusing on time-tested coding techniques-and providing code samples that use C++, and the OpenGL and DirectX APIs-Daniel has produced a guide whose shelf life will extend long beyond the latest industry trend. Code design, data structures, design patterns, AI, scripting engines, 3D pipelines, texture mapping, and more: They’re all covered here-in clear, coherent fashion and with a focus on the essentials that will have you referring back to this volume for years to come.

From the Inside Flap
“If you want to understand the fundamentals of programming concepts that underlie today’s games, this book leads the way. It explores such a wide range of algorithms and concepts, it should be required reading for anyone entering the game programming field.”–Alex Dunne, Executive Producer, Gamasutra.com

“…brings together material from a variety of advanced gaming topics into a single well-organized book. Wish I had something like this to refer to when I was starting out.” Download Now »

Book Description

With an analytical and rigorous approach to problem solving and programming techniques, this book is oriented toward engineering. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models. Its unique approach makes it appropriate for an introduction to computer science courses, as well as programming languages and program design.

Review
Abelson and Sussman’s classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs teaches readers how to program by employing the tools of abstraction and modularity. The authors’ central philosophy is that programming is the task of breaking large problems into small ones. The book spends a great deal of time considering both this decomposition and the process of knitting the smaller pieces back together.

The authors employ this philosophy in their writing technique. The text asks the broad question “What is programming?” Having come to the conclusion that programming consists of procedures and data, the authors set off to explore the related questions of “What is data?” and “What is a procedure?”

The authors build up the simple notion of a procedure to dizzying complexity. The discussion culminates in the description of the code behind the programming language Scheme. The authors finish with examples of how to implement some of the book’s concepts on a register machine. Through this journey, the reader not only learns how to program, but also how to think about programming. Download Now »

Book Description

This paperback edition is not available in the U.S. and Canada.

There are books on algorithms that are rigorous but incomplete and others that cover masses of material but lack rigor. Introduction to Algorithms combines rigor and comprehensiveness.

The book covers a broad range of algorithms in depth, yet makes their design and analysis accessible to all levels of readers. Each chapter is relatively self-contained and can be used as a unit of study. The algorithms are described in English and in a pseudocode designed to be readable by anyone who has done a little programming. The explanations have been kept elementary without sacrificing depth of coverage or mathematical rigor.

The first edition became the standard reference for professionals and a widely used text in universities worldwide. The second edition features new chapters on the role of algorithms, probabilistic analysis and randomized algorithms, and linear programming, as well as extensive revisions to virtually every section of the book. In a subtle but important change, loop invariants are introduced early and used throughout the text to prove algorithm correctness. Without changing the mathematical and analytic focus, the authors have moved much of the mathematical foundations material from Part I to an appendix and have included additional motivational material at the beginning. Download Now »

Book Description

The complex social behaviors of ants have been much studied by science, and computer scientists are now finding that these behavior patterns can provide models for solving difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The attempt to develop algorithms inspired by one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find what computer scientists would call shortest paths, has become the field of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), the most successful and widely recognized algorithmic technique based on ant behavior. This book presents an overview of this rapidly growing field, from its theoretical inception to practical applications, including descriptions of many available ACO algorithms and their uses. The book first describes the translation of observed ant behavior into working optimization algorithms. The ant colony metaheuristic is then introduced and viewed in the general context of combinatorial optimization. This is followed by a detailed description and guide to all major ACO algorithms and a report on current theoretical findings. The book surveys ACO applications now in use, including routing, assignment, scheduling, subset, machine learning, and bioinformatics problems. AntNet, an ACO algorithm designed for the network routing problem, is described in detail. The authors conclude by summarizing the progress in the field and outlining future research directions. Each chapter ends with bibliographic material, bullet points setting out important ideas covered in the chapter, and exercises. Ant Colony Optimization will be of interest to academic and industry researchers, graduate students, and practitioners who wish to learn how to implement ACO algorithms. Download Now »

Book Description

ParCo2007 marks a quarter of a century of the international conferences on parallel computing that started in Berlin in 1983. The aim of the conference is to give an overview of the state-of-the-art of the developments, applications and future trends in high performance computing for all platforms. The conference addresses all aspects of parallel computing, including applications, hardware and software technologies as well as languages and development environments. Special emphasis was placed on the role of high performance processing to solve real-life problems in all areas, including scientific, engineering and multidisciplinary applications and strategies, experiences and conclusions made with respect to parallel computing. The book contains papers covering: 1) Applications; The application of parallel computers to solve computationally challenging problems in the physical and life sciences, engineering, industry and commerce. The treatment of complex multidisciplinary problems occurring in all application areas was discussed. 2) Algorithms; Design, analysis and implementation of generic parallel algorithms, including their scalability, in particular to a large number of processors (MPP), portability and adaptability and 3) Software and Architectures; Software engineering for developing and maintaining parallel software, including parallel programming models and paradigms, development environments, compile-time and run-time tools. A number of symposia on specialized topics formed part of the scientific program. The following topics were covered: Parallel Computing with FPGAs, The Future of OpenMP in the Multi-Core Era, Scalability and Usability of HPC Programming Tools, DEISA: Extreme Computing in an Advanced Supercomputing Environment and Scaling Science Applications on Blue Gene. The conference was organized by the renowned research and teaching institutions Forschungszentrum Julich and the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Download Now »

Book Description

A human observer can effortlessly identify visible portions of geometric objects present in the environment. However, computations of visible portions of objects from a viewpoint involving thousands of objects is a time consuming task even for high speed computers. To solve such visibility problems, efficient algorithms have been designed. This book presents some of these visibility algorithms in two dimensions. Specifically, basic algorithms for point visibility, weak visibility, shortest paths, visibility graphs, link paths and visibility queries are all discussed. Several geometric properties are also established through lemmas and theorems. With over 300 figures and hundreds of exercises, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in the field of computational geometry. It will also be useful as a reference for researchers working in algorithms, robotics, computer graphics and geometric graph theory, and some algorithms from the book can be used in a first course in computational geometry.

Review
“The topics covered are all very visual, easy to understand, and well explained… A good overview of visibility algorithms in the plane, concentrating on basic algorithms but also covering the state of the art.”
Carola Wenk, Mathematical Reviews

“The text is conversational in tone, yet clear and rigorous in its exposition. In general, this text accomplishes its intended purpose well – providing a graduate-level text on visibility algorithms that can also serve as a useful reference.”
Alice M. Dean for SIGACT News Download Now »