Very nice book

This is a very nice book, with a simple language, easy to understand, if you aren’t a physic or math professional.
The formules are clean and light to put in your game source without down your hardware performance.

Excellent Beginner’s Book

This book gently introduces the reader to physics useful for game programming. It doesn’t try to be a PhD thesis (thank you, Grant!), which makes it easily approachable by someone with a solid grasp on Algebra (Trigonometry knowledge helps, but lacking it won’t hurt much).

Although the base material can be found in any good physics textbooks, the value here is in weeding out the unwanted fluff present in most textbooks, and presenting the material in plain language along with the equations. You would likely have to spend many times this book’s cover price, and spend many time the hours weeding out the nonsense. Grant strikes an excellent balance between mathematical correctness and easy reading.

Do yourself a favor, and save a spot on your bookshelf for this title. It’s easily worth twice its asking price, and I’m ecstatic at this book’s great bang for the buck.

Practical physics for game programmers

This title is also suitable for people with weak knowledge about math and gives easy to understand examples from everyday life. The physics models themselves didn’t go very deep under the topic but rather handled more common approaches to the problems which is often the case on game related physics.

Chapter covering collisions were a bit too superficial to my taste but it’s understandable since subject in all of it’s complexity would form a book on it’s own. Also all the examples were written in common Java rather than in pseudo code but works well for the purpose.

In overall this book is good starting point for game related physics but lacks profound optimization for large scale physic environment.

Java Game Programming Book

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this is a Java game programming book as all of the source code examples are in Java. The mathematics are not overwhelming and I found it to be a useful review of physics. I plan to apply what I learned to both game programming and academic simulation projects. I recommend.

This book rocks

I used the equations in the "Cars" chapter of this book to write a sweet street racing game for my senior project. I’m not real good at math or physics but I could easily follow the explanations. It was the only game physics book I could find that gave the equations for acceleration based on engine torque. Great book.

More of an engineer’s viewpoint of game physics

The book is divided roughly into two parts. The first part deals with general physical concepts, such as object collision, the equations governing projectiles, and a general review of Newtonian physics. One of the more interesting topics in this section of the book was the aerodynamic effect of spin on projectiles.
The second part of the book is about applied game physics. There are chapters on things like how to model cars, boats, airplanes and projectiles, using the principles outlined in the first part of the book, which is pretty much the same approach taken in David Bourg’s book on the same subject, "Physics for Game Developers". There is extra material here though, that is not mentioned in Bourg’s book such as the presentation of damage models for armored vehicles, an entire chapter dedicated to the physics of lasers, plus a chapter on sports simulation that includes such things as modeling a golf game.
The style of the book is thorough yet not verbose. Thus the book is only 400 pages versus the hefty size of David Eberly’s weighty tome on the subject. There are a couple of places where I might have liked to see a bit more treatment of a particular subject. For instance, the author punts on the topic of 3D collisions of rotating objects. Still, there’s enough related material included that I could likely work it out from what was presented.
Like Bourg’s game physics book, this is more a book about physics and simulation than about game programming. The examples shown are simple demo programs, because the purpose is to give you the idea of how to code this material, not present a full-blown application. The source code presented in the book is in Java, and can be downloaded from the book website at Apress.
I would say overall this book is on par with David Bourg’s book on the subject, and chances are if you are really planning to get into game physics it wouldn’t hurt to own both books. I liked this book better than Bourg’s because the author covered more topics and his code is Java based as opposed to Bourg’s more Windows-centric solutions. However, Bourg’s book is better at staying on topic, is better organized, and does not have the extraneous information on such things as the history of the devices being modeled as this book has. The table of contents is as follows:
1. Adding Realism to Your Games
2. Some Basic Concepts
3. Basic Newtonian Mechanics
4. Basic Kinematics
5. Projectiles
6. Collisions
7. Sports Simulations
8. Cars and Motorcycles
9. Boats and Things That Float
10. Airplanes
11. Rockets and Missiles
12. The Physics of Solids
13. Explosions
14. Lasers
15. Probabilistic and Monte Carlo Simulations

Awesome book for game physics

I love this book. Not only is it easy to read, but it gives you a level of detail that other game physics books don’t. For example in the sports chapter not only does the book go over the equations that govern the collision of a golf ball and club but it also provides the coefficient of restitution between the golf ball and club. I get really frustrated by other books that don’t give you all the information and then you have to search around for the missing pieces. This book gives you all the information you need to write realistic game programs. It’s also packed full of interesting historical trivia.

Excellent, well researched and written

How often have you found yourself hunting for some formula to use in a simulation type setting. Only to find it ankle deep in some academic work, where the formula is inverted and has all of the wrong units. Well, now we have a book where the author has done all of the hard work to get the formulae right, and organized into a concise form that is easy to use.

I’m very happy with this book. It’s strongly recommend for anyone looking for practical information and algorithms for simulations or games.

simple physics

The level of physics here is around a typical first year undergraduate physics course. Concentrating on kinematics. Unsurprisingly, because most videogames depict things in motion. Hence, if you’ve already had that amount of physics, you are in good shape for the book. You can now focus on the coding aspects.

The entire book is about simulations. The code isn’t that difficult to grasp. Perhaps the hardest aspect to some readers will be reconciling the two mindsets. How do you map from a set of physics equations to a computational representation?

The book also slides into object oriented programming. Useful if you are new to this idea. The simulations of various bodies lends to a very natural projection of a code object (a "class") onto a physical object that it simulates. Good pedagogy.

I’d rather read "Physics BY Game Programmers"...

While there is a good deal of valuable information in this book, there is not much (maybe not anything) you can’t find in a physics textbook or two. The author is an engineer with no (credited) game programming experience and his attempts to tailor his examples to game making fall flat.

Finally, I find it a bit suspicious that two very positive reviews appeared the day after I originally wrote this review (May 19th). Take reviews from ’Top’ reviews who have reviewed 500++ books with a grain of salt.