I think this book is better suited to people that have already written a few games.
It mostly talks about common patterns that arise during gamedev and how to work with them. IIRC, it shows trade-offs of different approaches.
I suggest starting out with Love2d [1]. Docs are good, community is great, lots of tutorials online.
There's this guy writing a tutorial series [2] on creating a game with Love2D. Not finished yet, but it is awesome! I think that would be a good place to start.
I was just watching a code challenge where a guy tried to make the game of Snake in 15 minutes (it took him 30 minutes.)
That introduced me to the P5 JavaScript library, and with that I was able to get up and running with just a web browser, an index.html page, and a script.js file.
I'm almost done with my clone of Snake, and after that I think I'd like to try a top-down shooter. I'm thinking of a simple runaway-from-zombies game.
Start by learning OpenGL. Two resources I would start with are the OpenGL Red Book [1] and NeHe [2] tutorials.
The OpenGL Red Book has everything a beginner needs to know about OpenGL and NeHe is a bunch of tutorials that you can study to learn more about the concepts. If you search around the web you should be able to find NeHe examples in your programming language of preference.
Thats way too much complexity to get into game programming. Just start with something where you can draw shapes and images to some canvas, and make it interactive. No need to start with 3d, and at least not the low level 3d stuff. Then you will never actually end up creating something.
Agreed. I'm currently teaching myself OpenGL, but only after getting pretty comfortable with using SDL and SFML for 2D graphics (drawing directly to a buffer in SDL, and using SFML to draw textured shapes, sprites, and such).
3D has a whole ton of boilerplate; it's better to start with something a little simpler to experiment with some patterns.
It does a good job explaining how to use OpenGL in the shader pipeline, instead of the legacy fixed pipeline, while also providing a lot of the annoying setup code (initializing the libraries and setting options, loading, compiling, and linking shaders, etc).
nehe tutorials are extremely dated by now, targetting old versions of OpenGL. By no means start with NeHe's tutorials.
The tutorials will compile and render stuff in the screen, but learning this in 2017 will do no good as all those APIs are now deprecated and I wouldn't be surprised if drivers start removing OpenGL 1.
