Who Are You?

Yes, you. Sit up straight, and stop slouching. (Don't you just love this assertive writing style?)

You're a programmer who wants to apply your abilities to 2D, 3D, and network games programming, for entertainment or as the first step in becoming a games programming professional. You want to write a game that uses the latest Java technology, not an applet showing a penguin waving its flipper.

You've done an introductory course on Java, so you understand about classes, objects, inheritance, exception handling, threads, and basic graphics. But you need information about more advanced stuff like the APIs for Java 2D, Java Sound, networking, and Java 3D.

You're probably most interested in multiplayer 3D games programming, because they're the coolest. They are hard to code, but this book will get you up to speed on how to build one.

You don't want to reinvent the wheel since Java is about abstraction, information hiding, and reuse. That translates into building games with existing libraries/classes/tools.