I don't know if I'm lucky or if I'm just good at reading book descriptions before buying one, but I seem to consistently find great books to read. Here is another really good one:  Game Design with HTML5 and JavaScript by Rex van der Spuy. 
  
At the encouragement of a good friend I decided to try my hand with JavaScript. I don't think this book is for true beginners, but you have some experience under your belt, it's a great introduction to using JavaScript with HTML5 and CSS to create a variety of games. The writing style is easy to read and the author goes over every line of code in the book (sometimes it seems too much so, but it's better to have too much explanation than too little!). 

 Reading is not doing so the author encourages the reader to get their hands dirty in every chapter and write some code using the techniques just covered. From the code the author provides, I was able to quickly write some demonstration games that worked quite well. 

Artificial Intelligence for Games, by Millington and Funge, is literally heavy and figuratively heavy with information, concepts and ideas. I love it! I've just started reading it and it's clear I will be spending most of the this year doing so.

The book is not hard to read, but I don't want to give this a quick read and move on to something else - I want to study it, understand it, savor it, and then write code using what I've learned. This is a book that begs to be used to write code. 

The book uses pseudocode to illustrate the  ideas, but you can download C++ code from this github repository. 

I'll update this review as I proceed through the book this year. 

The sample code is written in C++, but if you are proficient in Java or C# or C, it should not be difficult to understand the intent. I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about how I could have improved my code in earlier projects. 

Reading this book is like having a totally geeky conversation with the author about software development. His thoughts on how things 'really' work in practice really helped me feel good about some short-cuts I've developed to get around problems he was describing. 

Note that this book is provided online by the author for free, or you can buy it electronically or dead-tree version. I bought the paper-book to support the author and the craft of writing books. And I'm old school... I like the look of real books on my shelf. 

I look forward to using the techniques described in this book! Thanks, Bob!

I enjoy the Head First series of books, but they may not be for everyone. This book, Head First: Design Patterns, is not for beginning programmers, but you won't become an advanced programmer without understanding the concepts that are covered in this book. 

Pick up this book after you have some experience under your belt. Depending on your interest and needs, I suggest starting with the Strategy Pattern, the Observer Pattern, the Singleton Pattern, and the State Pattern. Then follow up those with the patterns you skipped in the book. 

To use this book effectively you should have a good understanding of OOP principles and be ready for extending abstract classes and implementing interface classes. If you don't know that those are, that's OK, the authors give lots of examples and you should reference your other Java materials to get up to speed where you have to.

This is a book I review every year or so to remind myself about the concepts and to pick up what either went over my head the first time, or what was not meaningful to me at the time. Reading a book like this again gives me confidence that my Java understanding has grown since the last time I read the book. 

Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to program professionally or wants to program like a professional. ​

James Buck, the author of Mazes for Programmers: Code your own twisty little passages, asks on the back of his book, "Remember when programming used to be fun?" I do. And writing maze generation code IS fun.

The author describes the algorithms as well as providing code in Ruby. For fun I wrote the code in Java since I don't know Ruby. The author does a very good job of describing the purpose of each line of Ruby, along with a textual description what the algorithm does so it is not very difficult to keep up. At the same time I'm writing a maze game, Operation Rescue, that transverses the mazes I'm creating. 

This is a book I highly recommend for anyone who wants to have fun coding again!
Go buy it! ​

The full title is The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine will remake our World, by Pedro Domingos. This book provides a good overview and historical view of what machine learning is and what the various types of machine learning are good at. 

I'm enjoying reading the book, going slowly through it, savoring it, and understanding and learning what I can. This is not a book to blow through.

This book is helping me pull together bits and pieces of AI knowledge I've gained over the years. Now I'm looking forward to learning more about machine learning and its relationship to AI. ​

I used this Java textbook in the Programming II class I taught this semester and I found it to be very useful and enjoyable to read. There are many, many coding examples along beside the text that explains the concepts. Many times I couldn't wait to try out the code in my own programs. ​

Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers is a classic of video game design. This book contains a huge amount of great information along with very useful appendices containing sample design documents, lists of story themes and environments, and templates for designing enemies and bosses. 

Much of the book focuses on the knowledge required to develop large multi-level video games, but the concepts of developing such games are still useful for developing smaller games for phones and tablets created by smaller teams of even individuals (like me!). 

If you are designing video games and apps, this book is a must read if only to provide you the necessary background and history of the field. Don't reinvent the wheel -- you need to know this information to know what other games have done and how they did it. Get this book. Read it. And then design your next game! ​