Today I write review for the book “Unity artificial intelligence programming fourth edition”, this book give you an overview and practical examples of following AI processes:
Finite machines
Behavioral trees
Machine learning
As I started to read this book I was pretty skeptical that even possible to cover such big topics only in 239 pages, still I experienced good times reading it.
Most of the presented examples of the projects in the book which you can obtain from Github, are working only in Unity 2018, some of the Unity3D project’s I was able to run in Unity Version 2019.
Clear pros of this book: well the theoretical and practical part are well balanced and you will quickly pick up the thinking patterns of the author.
Clear cons of this book: the code itself need to be polished more and actually there no unit tests !
Its kind of hard to make it runnable on Unity version 2019 already, if only the book authors provided unit test’s, then I would understand more how the code is working.
In the book you will find some sort of explanations what actually code doing, i say its like bad excuse, sorry for not writing readable code.
Do I recommend to buy this book?
I have really mix feelings about this, for beginners it can be rough, for more experience people well you need to dig deep in order to see the value of the book, I definitely prefer quality over quantity of presented information, so for me it’s really difficult to recommend this book.
Summary: This book give you quick and dirty introduction into AI , if you desperate enough you will gain knowledge otherwise don’t bother and see more tutorials on the internet, it’s actually the way: how technology works , as soon as information going into the book it immediately loosing the connection to the outside world, still it is better then nothing.