About six months ago I’ve mentioned for the first time that I’m going to write a book about new version of cocos2d, which is cocos2d-iphone v3.0.
Now I’m proud to say that the book is available for pre-order!
You can pre-order the book at Packt website: http://packtpub.com/cocos2d-iphone-3-0-beginners-guide/book.
When To Expect
The book is currently in pre-production stage. I’m making final edits and will submit all final drafts of the chapters quite soon.
The book is scheduled to go live in July 2014, but there is a chance that this will happen sooner. Well, at least I’m ahead of my chapters submission schedule 🙂
What’s In This Cocos2D iPhone 3.0 Book
I’m not sure I’m allowed to provide all the information until the book is actually printed, especially taking into account that I’m still making small changes.
However, almost all of the topics I’ve mentioned in this post are included in the book.
Also, instead of creating lots of mini-project the book covers process of game development from start to finish.
This means that you will go through all steps of game creation process, and will learn how to create a completed game!
Book Source Code
There are more great news! The book source code will be available for download from Packt website as well as from Github.
I will upload full source code and resources of the projects to Github as soon as the book will be released.
By the way, all game art and book cover is created by lovely wife Svetlana specially for this book. This means that you won’t see a mix of free game art resources gathered from all over the Internet.
When the book will be released I’ll create another post with more information, screenshots and excerpts from the chapters.
If you have any questions about the book, please ask them below and I’ll try to answer them!
I could use that book right now. I’ll be pre-ordering it out here.
Thanks, Baxter! We’re ahead of the schedule, so I think the book might come out somewhere in June.
I understand that 3.0 is already out, and 3.1 around the corner, but I’ve started the book when 3.0 was not even a preview, it just takes quite some time to make a good book.
By the way 3.1 will introduce few great features, but they mostly either performance improvements or just make your life easier (auto batching, more convenient custom shaders), so the book will still be perfectly valid.
Hi I have just bought this book and i LOVE it. However do I do not like using Texture Packer, do you have an undate for the automatic batching in chapter 4.
Thanks
BRoon
Hi Brendan!
I’m glad that you like the book!
To be honest, I haven’t looked into Cocos2D 3.1 yet, since I’ve had to put a lot of my projects on hold to finish the book, and now I need to complete them.
From what I heard, in Cocos2D v3.1 you just add sprites directly to the scene, just as we do it in the beginning of Chapter 4, and Cocos2D will automatically batch everything it can.
However, I would recommend you to complete the book using v3.0 to avoid any issues caused by the difference between versions. Of course we all love to use latest software, but for education purpose it is better to use exactly same version. After completing the book you can start your next project using the latest version. It will be much easier for you to learn few new features when you’ve mastered all the basics, architecture and main concepts.