Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development: Harness the power of procedural content generation to design unique games with Unity

[Some comments in this review may be outdated. The review was originally posted on 2016-05-29.]I bought this book hoping to see some interesting PCG techniques and in-depth insights, but was mostly disappointed. The book is suitable only as a basic introduction to PCG with Unity. People who have any prior experience with PCG will generally find little of value in this book.The quality of the writing is mediocre overall. There's generally no trouble with basic comprehension of what the author is saying, but the book has numerous minor typos and sometimes poor grammar/semantics. The style of the sentences is simple to the point of feeling stilted and bland. There's a fair number of sentences that don't really mean much beyond what the reader would already be assuming anyway. Some of the code examples contain typos of variable names, which is thus proof that at least some of the code samples were never tested at all (otherwise the compiler would have caught the typos).The author makes some incorrect statements about PCG in the book. For example, on the top of page 7 he says rolling dice and simulating other kinds of physical systems would allow you to generate truly random numbers on a computer, but because doing so is computationally expensive programmers use pseudo-random numbers instead. This statement is completely false. That is not the reasoning behind pseudo random number use. A dice simulation or other physics simulation would also be just as pseudo random. The author basically just completely fabricated this statement instead of doing proper research. There are several other examples in the text of him basically doing the same thing.I get the feeling that the author himself didn't actually know much of anything about PCG prior to writing the book. That being said, it would probably be a fair into to a beginner, provided the beginner is aware that the author's work contains errors and some bad advice from time to time. The code quality is generally poor to mediocre. The author frequently mixes implementation details that have no business being put together. Several of the classes he uses are also probably superficial and could be refactored (especially the "Manager" classes). The book has either been poorly edited or was never edited at all. The authors code is not very well factored and not very modular. His advice to use inheritance on a few occasions is also misguided. Components are a superior solution when properly understood.I have read online that Packt Publishing has a reputation for "quantity over quality" publishing. I even read about a different author on a forum describing how when he submitted their book to them, the publishers actually *added* more errors into the book through their editing than they removed from it and actually made the English quality worse instead of better. Supposedly they have non-technical editors who make changes to the technical text without actually fully understanding the context and semantics. Thus, it is possible some of the mediocre writing is the publishers fault and not the author's, but this is all speculation.The PCG techniques the author chooses to use are some of the most crude and uninteresting forms of it. He basically always just uses a plain old random number to select from a set of options every iteration. You won't find any advanced PCG algorithms in this book.In summary: This book is OK if you are a beginner at PCG, provided you understand that the author's work contains some misinformation and bad programming practices. If instead you are looking for deep insights into PCG or interesting PCG techniques (like me), then you should definitely avoid this book. It has little value to anyone who already understands the basics of PCG.You should also be wary of this publisher.

Bought this book expecting to learn basics of PCG. And I wasn't disappointed. This book definitely has lots of information about content generation but is also has errors. Too many of them for the book of this size and price.For example, not all code examples in the book are working as some parts of code are missing or are being used not in the right place.