This is an excellent publishing company. I highly recommend their books. Most of their books are on programming. Most of the books that are for programming comes with a disk. on the disk you can find a compiler and usually and IDE that goes along with the book you got. For example i got a C++ book and on the cd it has Borlands C++BuilderX. The books are set up in a way that is easy to understand. At the begginig of the chapter you will get an explanation of what you are going to learn in it. than it will explain some of the commands and tell you what they do. After that they give you some sample code for you to compile and when you do they show you what the output should be and they explain it line by line. than they will explain more commands and do the same thing over again. At the end of the chapter they have a quiz with questions than they have a list of activities you can try using what you just learned and previously learned material. than they give you the answers to the quiz. they also have a question and answer thing part at the end as well.

I agree 100% there. I have the PHP, MySQL, and Apache All in one book, and I give it an A++. Might look at some of the other titles also.

I wasn't particularly impressed with "Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming" - it didn't deal with anything even close to modern or current, even for 2d (for example it drew directly to a window instead of the much faster use of DirectX 2D or OpenGL APIs)

Haven't ever read any of the other Sams... books though, but I would imagine that programming language ones won't have the same shortcomings, as they don't change all that much

it all depends on when the book was published. The one I have is in its 3rd edition (and I bought it not too long after it came out).

all the ones i have are fine and i have them on C++, html and xhtml, php, game programming, and java. the one on game programming looked pretty cool to me.

No, they did it by choice, I checked the published date. Although I guess for learning basics of game design and gameplay programming, it works, but in terms of graphics engines (even for 2D), it sucks

I've used Sams C++ and javascript books and I found them both to be wonderful. They are great for learning the basics, and the format is superb for coming back to to use as reference.

Another series I like for programming is O'Reilles or howver you spell it =P).

I will try the Sam c++ book sometimes

here is another one that i recommend: Sams Teach yourself java 2 in 21 days. It goes into a lot more detail than the one in 24 hours and i cant wait to start it.

Cool deal. I'm considering possibly learning Java at one point; I just got this idea for an insanely huge and complicated but possibly popular MMORPG.

i get ideas like that too. for example my text editor that i was working on but than i ran into a road block and even the people at the official java forum couldnt even figure out how to fix it. Java is real easy though. Also in the back of the Java in 21 Days book they have a list of all the classes that you can include and what they do.

Look in your book on page ten where it has the information box and the author explains why he did not include it.

I have a nearly complete engine waiting for use :p you're free to use it (and I dont think you're gonna want to rewrite 2200+ lines of optimized, working, and highly modular code)

I got started with PHP using the Sam's Teach Yourself PHP.

Other good books are made by Sitepoint, which I learned AJAX from.