Unity Certified Programmer: Exam Guide: Expert tips and techniques to pass the Unity certification exam at the first attempt

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.

Great book!

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.

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.

The book has an absolute breadth of knowledge when it comes to the Unity Game engine. However, a sizeable amount of the information in this book is heavily outdated or obsolete (such as the chapter on micro-transactions). Also, the coding practices in this book are very questionable, as there is a very concerning amount of GameObject.Find() and GetComponent() calls (instead of using caching), as well as a very disturbing amount of string comparison. If you don't name your assets exactly as it is in the book, your code will not work. One final thing I noticed is that there is also a non-negligible amount of typos which I came across. Overall, I would strongly urge anyone to skip this book and find something more modern.