Unity 2020 By Example, Third Edition

I’ve been working in Unity for about three years now and decided to check this book out. The first half of the book has you building out basic projects and learning Unity. Specifically I was wondering if this book would have been helpful for me when I was a brand new Unity developer getting started. My answer is that yes, I would have benefited a lot from going through this book early on. Very quickly the chapters have you putting together playable game projects. My roommates even liked one game enough to get competitive playing it quite a bit. The projects have a good variety and build on one another to explain things. One of the first things you’ll want to do is download the Github repo for the book so you have the example files. The link to this is in the introduction of the book. It is a really big download (2GB+), but is very helpful as it contains all of the artwork, sound effects, and music referenced in the book for the projects. I tended to try and type everything out of the book directly into Visual Studio, but you could simply import the scripts instead. Around the starting in Chapter 5 the book doesn’t contain full source code of the scripts, so you will definitely need to get the scripts from the Github download. Also, a few of the diagrams in one chapter were all mislabeled and appeared offset by one screenshot, but the publisher will probably correct that in a future update. There was one problem early on that could be difficult to solve as a brand-new Unity user, and I should mention here in case it helps anyone. The book uses the Unity Standard Assets (a package containing generic functionality that is used in these projects). This book is targeted toward Unity version 2020 (as the title states). However, the Unity Standard Assets aren’t encouraged in this new version of Unity. The book does a good job helping you get the package installed, but in my Unity 2020.1.12f1 (book says 2020.1 + is fine), there is a syntax error I consistently got right away. “Assets\Standard Assets\Utility\SimpleActivatorMenu.cs(11,16): error CS0619: 'GUIText' is obsolete: 'GUIText has been removed. Use UI.Text instead.'” This is super easy to solve. Open the SimpleActivatorMenu.cs script in your code editor, and change line 11 from “public GUIText camSwitchButton;” to “public UnityEngine.UI.Text camSwitchButton;” Aside from that, the first three projects came together quickly. The first half of the book is very helpful for someone starting out, and I definitely learned a few new things along the way as well. The author does a good job of touching upon a lot of areas within Unity with these projects, and you will learn a lot working through the book. I made it about halfway through (to page 307 of 677) before writing this review. I’m looking forward to finishing the rest and will update here if my impression changes. I think the book deserves five stars because of how much someone will learn about Unity by going through it.

The first half of the book is a great introduction to the Unity platform. I had some experience with Unity in the past and this book was a great refresher and way to get you comfortable with the environment. Once it got to machine learning, however, the material lagged significantly behind the current state of mlagents. You will probably want something more comprehensive and up to date.

This is a great book for beginner unity developers who are transitioning into Intermediate unity developers who also have a strong foundation with C# and the non-Unity C# developers looking to transitioning into Unity developers. This book is project-based. It focuses more on taking the skills that you’ve already acquired and uses them to construct fully functional games based on several different project types. You might even learn a few extra things you didn’t know along the way. A good example would be when adding audio files that are longer than short clips such as background music and ambient noise, you should go to the audio asset's Inspector window and switch the Load type from "Decompress on Load" to "Streaming" so that when the game loads it isn’t holding all of those audio files in memory? This book very comprehensive and it goes over everything from building a simple collectible object project; to creating an Intelegenet Enemy AI project; to building a project using ML-Agents which is Unity's Machine Learn; to creating a Virtual Reality project; etc... If you’re an Intermediate Unity Developer or Non-Unity Developer who is proficient in C# and want to put those skill to use creating a wide array of projects then this is the book for you. I highly recommend it.

As an Unity Instructor I can say the book is really amazing I was expecting that I'd face a basic book, but instead, the book is very complete, even having AR and VR chapters totally adapted to the new version of Unity, that makes it one of the best books to master Unity (if not the best).

Let me first say that the code in the book has been great (and you can get it all from github if you don't want to type it all in). However, the illustrations are in grey-scale and hard to see and very grainy. If you download the pdf of color images, their quality is excellent, which begs the question of why that wasn't printed in the book in the first place. My copy of the book had pages from the 5th contents page to the beginning of Chapter 1 inserted backwards and upside down. So, already not the best quality control for the printing of the book. For the non-code content, sometimes things don't match up with the illustrations, some steps are left out (I've been able to work through them through Chapter 4 at this point), and a couple of things are already out-of-date. For instance, trying to use Standard Assets, I discovered that the scripts threw errors because the downloaded assets used deprecated Unity features. Fortunately, I'm used to navigating the Internet to sort out issues like this, but a beginning programmer is liable to have difficulty making progress. While the included code has been excellent, it is largely undocumented and uses Unity feature without much explanation other than "Here's a link for further reading". On the one hand, since the reader is being guided to a specific result, it might be a bit hazardous to explore feature options too much. On the other hand, permitting some exploration seems to me to be a good way to broaden the learner's knowledge. I'm finding this book useful for coming up to speed on Unity, but I have a long programming background. I'd hesitate to recommend this book to a beginner. Maybe a future edition will repair the shortcomings, in which case the base material would be a great framework, but as-is, it's not quite up to snuff.

途中までは星5レベルの内容だったが、1/3の辺りを過ぎたあたりからコードの説明もほとんどなくダウンロードしたサンプルコードから書き写してねという前提の内容になって呆れ果てる。

Came in with good timing, in excellent shape.

I haven't finished reading the book yet. but this bit of text is concerning me already: --------- The controls will use the industry-standard WASD keyboard setup, where W moves forward, A and S move left and right, and D walks backward. Head movement is controlled using the mouse, and coins are collected by colliding with them. -------- According to this book, the standard is that the "D" key moves back..."S" moves right.