Might I ask what's so terrible about the book, or using a book like that to familiarize ones' self with game coding?

I prefer self-study to schooling -- that's where I got my start doing web development close to 9 years ago -- and I've become very successful. Learning to code games is something that I've wanted to do since I was a kid. Jonathan Harbour's book is the second book I've started reading. The first one I read through was Beginning C++ Game Programming by Michael Dawson.

I wouldn't know erroneous code (from a C standpoint) or standards-breaking (same story) if I saw them; I have my own programming practices already.

What sort of stuff are you talking about? Any examples?

Actually, I reread that part of the book earlier today, and it's just worded funny and I read it wrong. It just names that command as something that's predefined. So it was my mistake.

I'm still curious what other sorts of things raise red flags to you folks. I mean you seem like a pretty enthusiastic, close-knit community of coders. There's got to be some merit to the hate on that specific book. I'd just like some perspective by example.

Also, are there any books that you guys would recommend? I know there are tutorials on the site here, but I'm more the type that needs a tangible book to sit down and read; have trouble concentrating when reading off my notebook's LCD.

I will say that I've encountered several instances where he uses depreciated functions, which I quickly just looked up here in the Allegro manual and found the updated function.

I've noticed that Mr. Harbour and I do have very different coding styles, and I've seen a few instances where he did things that the initial book I read -- and personal experience -- have taught me never to do. But I'm aware of those bad habits, so with any luck, I'll be able to inject a bit of my logic into my studies to keep from picking them up.

And yeah, I do totally agree that "All-in-One" or those "Teach Yourself insert language here in 24 hours" books are generally trash, but I actually have no complaints about his book so far. As long as I get what I need out of it, I'll be happy. I plan to continue my self-education beyond his book, but everything I read about it (comments on Amazon, etc.), it seemed like a good book to snag.

Keeping in mind that as I said before, I read Beginning C++ Game Programming (by Michael Dawson) first. That coupled with my existing programming experience, I feel like I have some good building blocks. Where I go from here? Well, they sky's the limit, but I hope this community is as helpful with everything else as they've been on this particular topic.

As an aside... You mentioned bad practices like conio. I did notice that while my initial read (Mr. Dawson's book) used iostream, Mr. Harbour's does use conio and stdlib. It seems to be very C-centric, where the other was strictly C++. I do kind of wish they both took the C++ approach, but I guess in all reality, the difference is just code structure.