Book recommendations

Just come across some books on Godot advertised. Has anyone read these? I might be interested in picking up one or two but some seem to be by different authors covering the same topic. I don’t want to pay and then find it’s not as correct as the others.

I’d watch out for LLM generated books, they seem to be on the rise and full of either downright wrong information or terrible code/habits. If you are looking at any books specifically, post a link to it

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As mentioned before, be very careful about AI books. Over a year ago I had to refund a book bundle on HumbleBundle after I started reading some of the books and they were obviously AI written with all of the weird lists everywhere and etc… luckily they gave me a full refund but after looking back at it, none of the advertisements mentioned any of the books being AI written which was frustrating.

I’m also gonna sneak in a book recommendation that helped me a lot before: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

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One I’ve seen in a bundle is Godot 4 Best Practices by Robert Henning. There’s also another best practices one I’ve seen but don’t recall the author.

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Ordered, look promising. I’ll post again here once received (Wednesday, 12/08/2026…)
Thanks for the ‘heads up’. :slight_smile:

Hope it works out.

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I’ve been going through this book and 7 chapters in, I’m trusting it less and less.
I feel like I would be struggling a lot more (or even giving up) if I hadn’t already done some tutorials for other game engines. Little inconsistencies here and there, some skipped steps - it adds up.

Chapter 7 was so egregious that I had to make an account here and talk about it. Some detailed examples:

  • A section in the chapter talks about adding a “double jump”. It technically does this while updating some code for a “handle jump” function, that was written earlier. However, it never acknowledges that it does this. Instead, the very next section adds a separate “double jump” function that largely duplicates the behavior that was added in the latter half “handle jump” function. So now there’s two functions that seem to do the same thing, except the “handle jump” function actually works AND can get the player to double jump, while the “double jump” function can’t function on its own.
  • Later, when it’s updating the functions called in the “physics process” function, it excludes the “handle jump” function, as well as a “handle movement” function that was made in an earlier chapter to handle left-right movement. So leaving the “physics process” function as shown in the book completely breaks player movement.
  • At this point I also realized that the “delta” variable was being passed into two functions it had us make (“handle movement” and “wall slide”), even though neither of those functions actually uses “delta”.
  • A few pages later, it once again revises the functions that are in the “physics process” function. It now has a “standard player movement” function that was never been mentioned or created before, which naturally causes an error. Presumably, this was meant to be the “handle movement” function.
  • From a quick glance, it looks like the code you can download from github is at least correct (I haven’t tried to run it), but most beginners are strongly encouraged to write code themselves.

I’ll keep going through the book for now because, if anything, catching these issues is good learning for me. However, I strongly do NOT recommend this book for absolute beginners.

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They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but the cover is AI generated, the book probably is too. This is a great overview of LLM-style errors, if this is how one learns programming they are going to have a terrible time and at best pick up some of the worst habits writing code.

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What is the book? You didn’t name it.

Likely this one, they were replying to a reply to you

Actually, my mistake, the book is “Godot 4 For Beginners”, 1st Edition by Robert Henning.
“Godot 4 Best Practices” was also in the bundle of books that I got, but I haven’t read it yet. Sorry about the confusion on that!

@weaselboy2 if you got the same bundle as I did, I’ve found out that “Godot 4 Game Development Projects” 2nd Edition is written by Chris Bradfield of KidsCanCode (which is also mentioned on the official Godot docs for text tutorials). I noticed that this book also doesn’t seem to have the “AI/Chat GPT” used disclaimer, so I assume it’s all hand written. I have yet to get into the book myself (will be starting now), but just thought I’d share.

I don’t have the bundle. Wasn’t sure if it was the same bundle as mentioned due to different user. I did however just watch a course where the instructor came across very similar to the book you mentioned. He was all over the place.

Speaking of bundles there was one for Zenva Academies books on Godot. Not sure what their pricing currently is but be aware that I got a years subscription to their online courses with downloadable PDFs and assets for the price of two of the books. That’s also all their courses and not just Godot. You could potentially get a lot more value out of signing up rather than the bundle.