Unity Certified Programmer: Exam Guide

Great book!

As an aspiring game designer that’s wanting to build upon my resume and portfolio, this book is a great tool for studying for the exam certification. It teaches structured, neat reusable code that also integrates a fun project to learn from. I highly recommend it.

I had a very nice experience reading Philip Walker’s “Unity Certified Programmer: Exam Guide”.The book is very well organized and all the necessary resources to follow along are available online on Packt’s repository (with the exception of some packages that need to be downloaded from the Asset store, please read the bottom notes). By the end of the book, the reader will be comfortable editing and manipulating indispensable features in the Unity software, will understand the organization of the Programmer’s Certification Exam, will have been exposed to advanced programming concepts such as Design Patters, and will have finished a small but robust demo game.By following along in the creation of the game, the reader explores different menus, tools and windows of the game engine. Although this is not a book for beginners (both programming experience and familiarity with Unity are required to understand the concepts explained), the author takes the time to double check and provides relevant links to Unity’s documentation. Once a piece of code has been written, the author guides the reader with comprehensive explanations about each line of code and its relevance with the overall architecture of the project.The author also did a great job breaking up the Certification Exam into sections and six core objectives, and those are covered meticulously throughout the text. Programming, the Art Pipeline, Application Systems, Environment Design, Audio, Optimization, GUIs, and Team Collaboration are covered and explained throughout the text. Every chapter starts with a clear set of objectives and how are they related to the Certification Exam. 
I was happily surprised when I found out that it not only covers the functionality of the game engine and some C# functions, but also includes the SOLID principles and an introduction to Design Patterns.  I've been working in Unity for a little over two years, and I hadn't found a well paced introduction to design patterns in game development. The text covers: Builder, Singleton, Prototype, Factory, and Dependency Injection, and provides several opportunities to apply these patterns in the project. In addition, all chapters come with a supplementary video available on YouTube and there are plenty of Mockup tests to review the concepts covered. 
Overall it is a great resource and I would recommend it whether or not the reader is taking the Certification Exam.Some extra advice: 

1) The naming of the folders in the project need to be exactly as stated in the book. For example, the teams I have worked with usually call name the Scenes folder with a plural word (same with the Scripts, Materials, etc.). In the book you will find “Scene” instead. This will become relevant when you import packages for every new chapter, just make sure you follow the conventions established in the book. 

2) Since some of the method calls are written before the method itself has been defined, the code will not compile until you finish all the required code. So be patient and wait for the end of the section/chapter to check for changes. It’ll work.3) That might not be your case, but I like to make personal changes to the code provided in the tutorials/books/etc. Because of this, I had to pay a little extra attention to which assets I was importing from the provided Unity Packages.Jan 15 2022. Unity has changed their monetization system, so some of the code in the book will be obsolete and will not compile because the required unity package is no longer available in the asset store. Some minor tweaking needed to be done.

I bought this on Packt but since Packt seems to not feature the ability to leave reviews (and most books have a single 5 star review with almost no comments- wink wink, we see what you are doing here Packt)...I wanted to like this book. It starts out fine and within 3 chapters or so you already see a game coming together.I just finished the 6th chapter, where the book has absolutely gone off the rails. To keep this short, in summary:1. The organization of the project is absolutely bewildering. I say this as a senior software consultant who gets paid $$$ to create from scratch and also fix previously existing code. A lot of the project organization almost feels artificially disorganized, to be able to display certain Unity features. This is most clear when something isn't working as expected and you find yourself jumping between Unity and your script editor, back and forth and back and forth, chasing down how SOActorModel/Scriptable Object relates to your game objects. The overall design of the project is poor and could be simplified to a massive degree,2. The editing of the book itself makes it a confusing mess. Often, and seemingly more as the book goes on, the author tells you to add components that you haven't even created yet. This means you have to either skim the book until you get to the part where you create the component you are being asked to add 14 pages ago (and in many or most cases, it's actually not even described- it's just entire left out by accident), or, what I started doing the 2nd time I encountered this situation in the text- just import it from the github code. But this feels bad. I am not learning anything by importing completed assets. So at any rate, you begin to lose trust in the instruction. A big red flag.3. It's outdated. Unfortunately this is all too common these days with the speed of development and how nothing ever stays the same in this field for too long. But the section on Monetization in Ch.6 is just entirely obsolete. You can't even download the Monetization asset anymore from Unity, full stop. Which leads the reader to look at Unity Ads documentation and try to integrate that into the project. But of course Unity's own documentation assumes a different style of project from what you are being led to build in the book, and they don't match or go together at all. So this was a total loss.With a little bit of love this could be a great book. But after seeing how Packt doesn't let you review books, and seeing how they let this one get published seemingly without any single run through from anyone not the author for a quality check... I get the feeling Packt is a pretty shitty publisher. They don't really care about the quality of their product line. They just want to force you into a Packt subscription when you attempt to buy a single ebook. I should have known right then and there what I was in for.

For starters, I'm not taking the Unity Programmer Exam, but I was looking for a book that would help me understand the core features of Unity (no matter what version). THIS book isn't like your typical Unity book that teaches parts and odd bits of Unity and then moves on. It will take you through an entire prototype in creating a game that works on a phone, tablet, and PC. This book is large and will take you a couple of months to get through from start to finish But because of this book, I now have a job as a Unity Developer. Thank you so much.

As a full time unity developer, this book is what every developer interested in taking the Unity Certification Exam, was looking for. Unity has great platform for learning, but when it comes to more advance tasks, effective within professional pipelines it gets tricky and stack overflow plus some remarkable youtubers seems like the only great friends of yours. I am very excited about this book.

Buen libro para empezar en el mundo de unity y aprender a gestionar un pequeño juego, con nota negativa la calidad de impresión la calidad del papel podría ser un poco mejor.

Great book, well written really can't fault anything about it and a decent price as well