Artificial Intelligence for Games, Second Edition

The vast majority of software development books, whether it be for line-of-business app dev or game development, seem to have little to no information that can be found via a casual internet search. This book is one of the few exceptions. There is a refreshing breadth and depth of game AI knowledge in this book that has been of tremendous help. Unlike the common "Gems" series of books, this book contains enough information on nearly every topic for the reader to build a 'ground up' implementation of their own. My only complaints are that the pseudocode seems to be overly simplified and not as easily converted to a concrete implementation as I'd like, and that even for a book on game-specific AI implementations, the authors seem to enjoy a bit more of an academic/idealized approach to the design. That might be less bothersome to a professional game developer, but I'm at the hobbyist/indie level, and sometimes need a quick-and-dirty implementation before I begin to really understand what's going on. Having said that, I was able to use the book to learn about and implement goal-oriented action planning, fast and flexible A* path finding (with additional info on modified funnel algorithm online), and several other critical components. I would absolutely recommend this book.