Minecraft Modding with Forge: A Family-Friendly Guide to Building Fun Mods in Java
M**O
This is an excellent beginner book
This is an excellent beginner book. They say no java experience is required (and that's almost true) but some basic java is helpful. That said, the book uses very basic java to get the game to do some pretty cool things. If you are a parent who's kid's play minecraft and you know a little java than this is the absolutely best place to start modding. I'm a single java programmer with no kids and I still got a decent bit out of this book.If you want to move on to some more advanced modding after this, I suggest Sams Teach Yourself Mod Development for Minecraft in 24 Hours. You definitely need to know java better for this but it teaches some more advanced modding techniques. The author of that book also maintains the wuppy29.com modding site and he really knows what he is talking about.
8**1
Out of date, when’s the 2nd edition coming?
I used this book to make a mod, so for that I think it was a good book. But it was a mod for Minecraft 1.8, and Forge has changed drastically for newer versions of Minecraft. So this book is hopelessly out of date. I wish there was an updated edition of this book.
R**R
Three Stars
my 10 year old son likes learn to mod better. will eventually be ready for this level.
M**L
I loved this book
I loved this book. It was easy to follow, especially in getting everything set up; specifically Minecraft, Forge, Eclipse, and the Java JDK. It's oriented as a "do as I do", copy what I've written for several example mods. It does make some attempt to explain what's happening, and does well for adult or older kid to understand. A determined kid could figure out why if he tries to extend the example to his own thing.I personally used it as a launching point for a Java modding class with 2nd years through middle school. I was able to use what the book offered to figure out how to make our own custom mods, rather than just following the book.
N**Y
Great Book - but slightly out-of-date from new Forge / Minecraft versions
An excellent book for getting started on Minecraft Modding, even with very limited programming experience. ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: while the concept and java components are still accurate, Minecraft Forge (modding component) has undergone a significant re-write recently, which has made some of the lessons incorrect.For example, the first Mod lesson as written in the book: public void sendMessage(BreakEvent event) { event.getPlayer().addChatMessage( new ChatComponentText (EnumChatFormatting.GOLD + "You broke a block!")); }The above won't work if writing mods for 1.10 or higher (1.11 is current version). Forge has changed the ChatComponent object model. Below is the corrected version, for reference: public void sendMessage(BreakEvent event) { event.getPlayer().addChatComponentMessage( new TextComponentString (TextFormatting.GOLD + "You broke a block!")); }Note that "ChatComponentText" was changed to "TextComponentString", and "EnumChatFormatting" was turned into "TextFormatting".MOST of the lessons still work with little-to-no tweaking needed. Also, Eclipse is a good Java editor, and will pop up viable options after typing the period (aka type in TextFormatting, then hit the period - Eclipse will present a list of viable options for what comes next). This helps quickly figure out any slight changes needed.It is unfortunate that the very first lesson was one that required some minor tweaks. I could see this discouraging people early on, when in fact, most of the lessons will work fine.I understand and appreciate that printed tech books will go out-of-date. The only reason I took one star off was because the author made several references to keeping online supplemental material (primarily on github) up-to-date, which as far as i could find, was not the case. I downloaded all the code examples, and found them identical to the book.It would require a very minimal amount of effort to keep the examples up-to-date with the newer object models, hence making the book more useful for a longer time (and presumably sell more copies).
W**T
Good intro to writing 1.8 (Forge) mods. E-book format not-so-good a source of code snippets.
First, content-wise, this book is a very good place to begin learning to create mods for Minecraft 1.8.x (the version is important as it differentiates this book from others). It's by no means perfect (especially for someone you does not already know how to do Java programming on a PC); but it tries to walk the inexperienced reader through all the environment and third-party toolkit configuration that is required to begin modding and all that information is one place. It also has a very clear set of "lessons" it uses to get you started with a variety of modifications you are most likely to want to attempt (at least as a beginner). If not for this book, you're basically stuck going through the myriad of online tutorials, articles, forums, videos, and existing mods source code as best you can.That said, this review (and its rating) is for the Kindle e-book variant specifically and is meant to influence those unsure of which format (digital or tree) to purchase. I bought this e-book specifically to use as a side-by-side companion to the running development environment (on a PC) with the expectation that I could cut-and-paste from the e-book (reader for PC) into the source editor with minimal fuss and follow the author's flow easily. This I thought was the major value-add of the digital kindle copy over the tree-based variant. I was wrong. Really, really, really wrong. With Amazon's push into textbooks on Kindle I am surprised how bad an experience this is. In a nutshell, you cannot cut-n-paste the code snippets with some semblance of useful formatting and each copy attaches a massive copyright notice of some kind (so if I select and copy the text "org.devoxx4kids.forge.mods" I also get three sentences of legalese-junk that is not part of what I've selected). For goodness sake, it's a software coding "how to" e-book that you cannot cut the samples or tutorial code snippets out off.In summary, download the companion source files as directed by the author in the Introduction section; from these cut-n-copy snippets as needed. If the ability to lift code snippets directly from the tutorials into your development environment is why you're considering the e-book, don't. Buy the tree based book instead.
S**M
A mixed effort.
This is for the Indian edition printed locally. The binding doesn't open as flat as the original O'Reilly books but for this price, you can't really complain.The paper is also of a fairly poor quality.The book should be used as a reference to find things on the net. Minecraft is known for breaking backward compatibility, so anything in print should be taken as obsolete. Having said that, there are obvious gaps in the book's very first chapter, where the instructions for downloading and installing the tools are either wrong, or incomplete. I suggest using the Forge wikipedia articles instead of this book. Also, be aware that they use Windows as a reference, so Mac and Linux users will have to adapt the instructions for their systems.You also need to know Java to get around this book. It's also not really written for children. It's more for parents who are comfortable with programming in general and Java in particular. If you expect to pick this up and write a new mod from scratch, think again. It's better suited for tweaking example mods given in this book and elsewhere.
M**E
Five Stars
Appears well written and informative.
S**L
Perfekte Einstiegshilfe
Vorausgesetzt man ist kein kompletter Eclipse / Java Neuling stellt dieses Buch eine perfekte Einstiegshilfe für die Entwicklung von Minecraft Mods mit Forge dar. Es kann ein komplettes Beispiel-Projekt zum Buch heruntergeladen werden, das einem dabei hilft, selbst in kürzester Zeit kleine Mods zu entwickeln.Zwei Hinweise mögen hilfreich sein, damit man sich nicht zu viel erwartet:- Es wird nur Forge für Minecraft 1.8 behandelt. Wer noch Mods für 1.7.10 entwickeln möchte, wird mit diesem Buch nicht sehr viel anfangen können.- Komplexere Themen wie WorldGen, Biome- und Dimension-Handling etc. werden nicht behandelt.
@**I
満足です
海外書店からの購入が初めてでしたが、期日の早めに届き、梱包も全く問題ありませんでした。
C**R
Hours lost trying to fix broken code, errata is out of date
Too much of the code does not work and some of it is not easy to fix as a newbie to Forge. I have plenty of programming experience. Very frustrating. The website has some errata but that still doesn't help. The code is broke, I have used the source code. If you don't want to keep it up to date, stop selling the book. It is zero fun as a newbie having no idea why it doesn't work.