What textbooks will teach me about the programming aspect of games?

I don’t know squat about game design, but I would be very surprised if at least some of their textbooks aren’t standard books about programming and algorithms. It seems to me that you would want to have a really solid foundation in object oriented programming, design patterns, and algorithms, especially if you want to be innovative. To that end I would recommend the Deitel and Deitel Learn to program series if you’re fairly new at object oriented programming, pretty much anything published by O’Reilly, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software , by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides; and Algorithms : sequential, parallel, and distributed, by Kenneth A. Berman and Jerome L. Paul.

Here are some books directly related to gamin, I don’t know anything about them specifically, but I found them in the local university library catalog rather than online:

Game design foundations / Roger E. Pedersen

Game design : a practical approach / Paul Schuytema

Fundamentals of game design / Ernest Adams, Andrew Rollings

Game design course : principles, practice, and techniques—the ultimate guide for the aspiring game designer / Jim Thompson, Barnaby Berbank-Green, Nic Cusworth

Fundamentals of Game Design / Ernest Adams

well you should find a copy of Game Design: Theory and Practice that should help you

After taking a look at the contents and the authors i decided i will go for Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams.

Thank you both very much!

@Thammuz Hope it works for you!

@Snarp Well, the author used to work for Bullfrog, as lead programmer for dungeon keeper so his credentials are more than alright.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn campus, one of our satellite campuses, has an entire concentration in video game development, and I know some people who are in it. 90% of the classes are computer science courses, with a few advanced project courses in game design. It’s actually a Computer Science degree with a concentration in game development. They take a couple interesting classes, mostly focusing on DirectX and XNA development, and there’s an entire class using the Xbox 360 dev kits (there’s a game development lab). Here are some class descriptions (with textbooks):

Game Design and Implementation
Game Design and Implementation II
Artificial Intelligence

There are also classes in Computer Animation, Computer Graphics, and C# Programming but I couldn’t find descriptions. This is the textbook used for the C# class (which is mostly focused on DirectX and XNA) and this is a supplementary book they use for XNA.

This book is used in Computer Graphics.

These classes are all designed to follow an intensive traditional Computer Science courseload, and they’re all upper level classes. By the time you would get to these classes, you would already have had three semesters of Calculus, two semesters of Discrete Math, three programming courses, and two courses in Algorithms and computer organization, as well as a pile of other engineering math classes like Linear and Matrix algebra, statistics, etc.

@noyesa Interetingly enough the Game Design and Implementation course refers to Andre LaMothe’s website which i found this morning while looking up tutorials. I also found out this same morning that he wrote a book that gives you the foundations for game development and i’m seriously thinking i’ll buy that instead. It’s more in depth, less expensive and seems to be all in all more in the direction of what i’m looking for.