No doubt, GPU acceleration is here to stay. As graphics cards continue to add cores and systems like Fermi push the limits of what’s possible, we will continue to see it making inroads into our day-to-day applications. This weeks’s recommended resources go out to all of you programmers and software developers who may need to brush up on one of the big standards in GPU computing: OpenCL.
First up is the latest edition of ‘Introduction To Game Development’ from Steve Rabin.
Welcome to Introduction to Game Development, Second Edition, the new edition of the book that combines the wisdom and expertise of more than twenty game industry professionals to give you a unique introduction to all aspects of game development, from design to programming to business and production. Organized around the curriculum guidelines of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), the book is divided into seven independent sections, each featuring articles written by the experts on those topics. Suitable for both an introductory game development course or as a reference for game developers and designers, the book offers coverage of all the key concepts and ideas that encompass game development, while providing real-life examples and practical insight. Fully revised for today’s technology, this second edition features an expanded section on game design, a new chapter on game writing and interactive storytelling, and much more. And the accompanying CD-ROM contains all the source code, demos, art files, and other materials referenced throughout the book. Introduction to Game Development, Second Edition is a must-have resource for anyone who wants to understand the entire game development process.
In addition, you might want to brush up on massive parallel programming strategies, with ‘The Art of Concurrency’ by Clary Breshears:
If you’re looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, this practical book provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The Art of Concurrency is one of the few resources to focus on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multi-core processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations.
Written by an Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you:
- Understand parallelism and concurrency
- Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory
- Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning
- Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks
- Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations
The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms for concurrent programming, this book is a must.
You can find these books, and several others, in the VizWorld.com Store!
