Thanks Bob, I appreciate your response. To be honest, I haven't read the entire book. However, I looked at the table of contents, and it appeared to be a run-do

Thanks Bob, I appreciate your response. To be honest, I haven't read the entire book. However, I looked at the table of contents, and it appeared to be a run-down of well known game design patterns. For someone who wants to get educated on those patterns, that's probably fine. For someone new to the topic of game programming, they're probably going to benefit from the style I described, e.g. hand-holding them in creating a game from scratch, progressively going from simple to complex after understanding the pains along the way, introducing new concepts as needed and just-in-time. So this may have been just an issue of understanding who's the audience of the book. That being said, the point about doing X at scale wasn't my issue. Take for example programming language books and/or documentation. The typical approach in almost every book/guide is teaching you about syntax, data types, control structures, etc. While this is valuable information, it's not usually what a person new to the language is looking for. What they're looking for is (most probably) what is unique about this language in solving specific domains of problems. New to Erlang? You probably should be introduced to a problem that deals with concurrency and reliability, and get walked through an example of how Erlang can solve it elegantly. New to Python? You should probably be introduced to a problem that deals with manipulating data, and get walked through an example of how Python can help you wrangle data easily. Etc. > For many of the chapters of the book, I try to walk readers through the problems of simpler approaches as well as I can, but it's a continuing challenge. Please continue to do so. I'm sure the praise you get for your book is well deserved, and part of the reason is your approach to teaching the patterns. > There really is no substitute for experience. Agreed. And part of the teaching style I'm advocating for is making the learner "earn" the skill by showing them the way, not the destination.