Free Unity eBooks this week

Packt Publishing give way a free eBook every day. This week is Unity week. The first one has already been and gone, but that still gives you the chance of getting 6 Unity eBooks.

https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

 

The webpage makes it look like its an entire month of Unity books (which isn't a bad thing.)

 

Gah... their registration page isn't working... the recaptcha js file is throwing an error and I can't even register. Oh well.

 

worked for me

 

Are the books any good? I hate registering...

 

Can't really say because I haven't read any of these titles.
I added them to my account because why not. However, some of them don't really interest me, so I probably won't look at them.

There is a sale they have going too. Interesting stuff there as well.

 

I registered, and got my free UI book. Good thing too, as it uses the new UI system. It says it was published in January 2015, has the new GUI been out that long?

 

The new GUI came with Unity 4.6, which launched in 2014.

 

Are they planning to give away all 22 game development books for free? Or is it only 7 books for free in just one special week only?

 

At the very least it has some downloadable code samples that might be useful to look at.

Thx for sharing @moonjump!

 

It looks like they are giving away all of them. I'm not sure if it'll be useful but I can look through them and the nicer ones order in print. I'm still waiting almost a day later for them to show up in my Kindle account on Amazon.

 

This isn't the first time they've done this event. Each of those days will have a free book. That said they won't all be Unity and they won't necessarily be game development either. They pull titles from their entire database.

Last time I ended up with some really odd books like CoffeeScript Application Development and jQuery UI Cookbook.

 

I never got any mail about this, but after I logged into my old Packt account and started grabbing those books I've received two e-mails about upcoming books. Seems they give up on you if you're not buying books for a while - at least they're less spammy and naggy than other companies

 

There is always a free book a day, they are all computing books, but not all game development. They also have ones on web development, networking, security, etc. Recently they started having themed weeks, and this week is Unity.

 

I'm keeping an eye on it. I already had the first two. 1st one on paperback from Amazon and 2nd one as ebook from Amazon. Honestly didn't find anything useful in either of those two though. Seems like every book I've seen for Unity is for beginners never get into any advanced stuff at all. I suppose many of these books are written by beginners though. Actually... now that I think about it this is the way it is for generally all computing books. There are exceptions of course.

 

Finding intermediate books is damn hard. After a million of these beginner books have been released you'd think those beginners would be ready to move on to more advanced things, and happy to spend some money on books which don't regurgitate the old Hello World-level newbie code we've seen 999999 times before.

Shader books are generally a good purchase though.

 

Did anyone getthe ui book? Any good?

 

Those books are there to make the authors and publishers money, not make us guru.

It's OK as in it somewhat thoroughly lists the UI elements and code snippets to use those elements. It's not a book to inspire you to an original design except that it does list those UI elements for you so you can consider them.

It's worth the money as a printout of the book for convenient and comfortable reading not so much as a PDF or Kindle book where it is awkward and not as efficient as Unity's own HTML manual and learn section.

 

Yesterday, I just purchase the all green Cookbooks Unity Bundles 5 for $50. I believe this cookbook bundles teaches somewhere around a mid-beginner level who already should know how some basic Unity works. I recommend this book for beginners, because this book is not too easy for beginners, and most of the too easy for beginners tutorials can be find for free in online. I think this all green cookbook unity bundle is best bundle out of those four bundles.
https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/unity-week-2016

I also did their survey to get 75% discount. So I used their 75% discount to buy $23 Mastering CSS video, that maybe should not be too easy for me. I purposely buy this harder level CSS level to make a webpage, because I can easily find every beginner level tutorial for free in this online http://www.w3schools.com .
https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/mastering-css-video

I think I have spend $73 in total, but I saved like hundreds of dollars already.

 

Most of these books are free online anyway if your local library has a safaribooksonline subscription. I was reading a Packt UI book and a VR book last week.

 

My library has movies, physical books and e-books by local authors, but no Safari subscription. I'd bet this isn't a thing for most of the world

 

Of course not but it is pretty common up here. All are local libraries appear to have it. IIRC Computertech is from Toronto which has it.