FYI, there is a literal "X-G" member that has been away from the boards for a couple of years, but has been here for many years, is much more well known, and much more respected. You should refer to members with their full name to avoid such ambiguity.

While I agree it's a good idea to step back and look at the big picture and structure the book properly. I think at this point it's best for the progress to keep bulldozing through all the features of Allegro, you building good material that you can use in the book puzzle.

Also if you should burn out and say screw this in a few days, you'll have written a whole slew of good material that you can put up right away even if it's not all polished to perfection yet.

Keep going, I think it would be great for Allegro 5 to have a book. You're a hero for actually working on it.

I am not the X-G you are talking about.
Mine is a nickname where G stands for Gangsta, but that is just for fun.
I hope all want to help, because i am not going to let the work in the middle.
I am on page 133, just for curiosity.

I attached the second chapter on docx format.
You can edit the second chapter now.
Thanks for consideration!

Thanks. I was actually needing a lot of help with transformations.
I want to include it as a chapter, but since i only got the scale transform to work
I think it will not be done, unless someone can help with examples of all kinds of transformations, so i can verify they work and understand them better.
There is going to be a lot of work, but i think i will end working on the book on 1st September, because of the exams. I will work on the book in October after i am done with school. So, if you want the book as fast as possible and best possible, pls help!

I learned programming with allegro 4. I think, back then, it was really what a beginner needs to know, I could paste some commands, allocate some memory, write to it, blast it to the screen and write messy code. It was ideal for hacking.

I remember that I tried allegro 5 once, it worked immediately, but I feel its concepts are (probably obviously) more advanced than those of allegro 4. For me the point is: when I am able to understand and use allegro 5, I am probably also able to use other advanced libraries to create games and "surpass" it. For example, I use a lot of Qt with OpenGL directly, so I have no reason to come back to allegro 5 again, althought in itself, it is not bad. Since a long time, Qt does the event loop stuff, platform-independent threading, networking stuff, GUI and a lot of other neat things for me. For an advanced game I probably would look into readily available engines and adapt them.

The "hacking it together"-mentality of allegro 4 gave it its own validity.

edit:
The whole point: allegro 4 was so simple you did not need a book to understand it.

For fun, I reformatted the given chapter using a more standard textbook page size and formatting style. It reduces the chapter from nine pages to two and a half, which is still, in my opinion, a bit too long to devote to showing how to create a dialog box.

I was going to edit the text to a language style that I considered more appropriate for such a book, but then I realized I'd have to rewrite everything, so didn't bother. Especially since, as I already mentioned, I think this topic is given far more length than it deserves.

Also, the code sample given needs to be rewritten:

#include <allegro5\allegro.h>
#include <allegro5\allegro_native_dialog.h>

int main(void)
{
   al_show_native_message_box(NULL, "3.5",     "321World!",
   "Hello world!", "Whatever|Maybe","ALLEGRO_MESSAGEBOX_YES_NO");
   return -1;

   if(!al_init())
   {
      al_show_native_message_box(NULL, NULL, NULL, "Error!", NULL,
      NULL);
      return -1;
   }
}

I haven't really done any A5 programming, but I'm sure this is what you want:

#include <allegro5/allegro.h>
#include <allegro5/allegro_native_dialog.h>

int main()
{
   if(!al_init())
   {
      al_show_native_message_box(NULL, NULL, NULL, "Error!", NULL,
      ALLEGRO_MESSAGEBOX_ERROR);
      return -1;
   }

   al_show_native_message_box(NULL, "3.5",     "321World!",
   "Hello world!", "Whatever|Maybe",ALLEGRO_MESSAGEBOX_YES_NO);
   return 0;
}

Even then, will the al_show_native_message_box(NULL, NULL, NULL, "Error!", NULL, NULL); line even work if al_init() fails?

edit: Apparently the answer to that last question is yes, going by the manual.

None of that is actually good for games, aside from the networking. But I remember, you couldn't compile A5 yourself so you found something easier.

Just to demonstate. Here are the top rated games on qt-apps.org. These are the type of games you'd get with an operating system, but far from anything complex:

http://qt-apps.org/index.php?xsortmode=high&page=0&xcontentmode=4250x4251x4252x4253x4254&PHPSESSID=0a61f54cc58549290b8d0b8852c9e879

There is no reason to be that arrogant. I had issues with cmake, since I never used it before at that time. Of course, I got it to compile. I am not Super-Trent, sorry.

While it's true that not many people use Qt for games, it is more than capable for this. Look here for what's possible with Qt: http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/ambassadors/showcase/ (Under Industry select "Games/Entertainment")

Hey Alex-G, keep up the good work.

Here is some feedback on chapter 2:

-> I think you mean quotes: ", not parentheses: ()

-> The same goes for the third and fourth parameters.

-> This is correct, but a very dense style that is more appropriate for scientific papers. It might be simpler to write "to make it work", or remove that bit of the sentence all together.

When I write code tutorials, I always like to give the code a distinctive style from the rest of the text. For example create a style in word for code, using a monospace font (such as courier new), and a light-grey background.

Final remark, you use a rather large font size. No wonder you write so many pages so quickly For the final version you will probably want to use a smaller font size.

Anyway, I applaud the effort. You probably won't make any money on this, but if it helps somebody, than it's totally worth it. I wrote a couple of tutorials myself a long time ago, and I still occasionally get positive feedback on it.

I read quite quickly (compared to most people, not you guys ), and I find the font being this big an irritant. My eyes are getting sore from moving left to right so quickly, and its difficult to read at my normal speed.

If you want to please people with poor eyesight, then keep it at 12 or 14 pt for regular text. I wouldn't even print this out, because I'd have to use a LOT of paper to get the info I wanted.

I usually take normal-sized pdf books and print them 4-6 pages per sheet to save paper.

EDIT:

I know its asshole-ic of me to ask without reading, but what are you using to write this in? Spinning off of Amarillion, it may be beneficial to syntax-highlight your code, that way it can be analyzed easily. Line numbers are a must.

If you write your code in an IDE, they usually have an export to rtf/html action. You can use that to copy your beautifully formatted (and dare I say functional!) code into word.

Personally, I still feel that 16pt is header sized font. There is the 'zoom' feature on the computer, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who has problems reading printed text probably already has reading glasses.

If you are using word 2010, I believe it has a way to index things. A book can never be better than its index!

Since everyone else is being too polite, I'm going to be the one to say it: if you're still at the level of asking questions like this one, you shouldn't be writing books about Allegro 5 or game programming.