Hey all, I’ve been a huge fan of Unreal for years, and loved following Zak and his work at 3D Buzz and the Mastering Unreal Development series of books that he released. Any idea if there are any similar books planned in the near future? The Wiki and Youtube are a huge help, but sometimes I feel so lost trying to learn Blueprints.
Thanks!
I’d give it some time.
Once everyone gets the proper knowledge I’m sure a few books will be made.
Then again I’m not expert, but I really don’t see why there wouldn’t be any…
~ Jason
We don’t have any specific plans for any books in the near future. We’d definitely be interested in knowing how much demand there is for them though since, speaking from experience working on the Mastering Unreal books, they are a large undertaking that require a serious investment of time and resources. There has been talk of doing one or more books for UE4 in the past and it may be something we look into in the future.
Personally, I have been intrigued by the idea of an iBook. The interactive capabilities could be really cool. I imagine things like embedded interactive Blueprint graphs that show you the results of changes you make immediately. Hell, I’d like to be able to do stuff like that in the online documentation! Hmmm, I wonder how angry the Tools and Platform teams would get if I asked for an HTML 5 version of the editor… 
Anyway, our goal is to create the best documentation and training possible. Currently that is focused on improving the new-user experience, filling in holes in the documentation, documenting new features, adding more useful and engaging tutorial experiences within the editor (these are going to be super cool!), creating more ‘how-to’ guides for specific real-world applications, improving search and discoverability of information, and tons more.
Someone made a post don’t know what was his username, but this is what I remember.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Unreal+Engine+4
Also if you know C++ Blueprint is basically the same thing. BTW you don’t need to know C++, Blueprint can make any game you can think of.
Wow , your enthusiasm speaks volumes, and gets me super excited (that’s right… Super excited) about what’s in store.
And I agree. While my classic paper bookshelf will continue to grow, a platform like Unreal may benefit more from the style of iBook you described.
I can’t wait to see what your team comes up with next, keep up the good work!
I would be very happy if there is a book for UE4 but publishing a printed book could be hard because Epic Games usually release new versions of UE4 every month. What about “books” that are viewable on websites?
I think is what was talking about, when he mentioned eBooks. You can update them on the fly.
If there were books, I’d like to see the Documentation turned into an eBook, plus a Cookbook (for those times when you don’t want to learn everything, you just want to get something done.
).
An eBook is really just a regular text book in digital form. If we did a book, I’m sure making it available in digital form would make a lot of sense. However there are certain advantages to print versions as well - schools generally require books to be in print form, for example.
What I was talking about was an iBook which is an Apple thing. It’s basically a book in app form for iOS so you can imagine all the possible types of interaction that could provide. The drawbacks there are it’s proprietary nature and the fact that none of the unique experiences you create for it will transfer to other platforms and formats. It’s still a cool thing to think about, though.
The cookbook idea is something we are currently trying to incorporate into the documentation with the ‘how-to’ items. It’s clear there is a need and demand for showing people how to do specific things in addition to showing them how the engine works. We had to shy away from things like that previously because the engine was changing so fast that it made things go out of date very quickly. Now that it’s publicly available and things have stabilized, we are able to put those together without worrying as much about how we would maintain them, though it’s still a concern.
I would love to see a book on UE4, I’m still disappointed that I can’t get any real use out of the two (large) UDK books I bought back when I thought I’d give UDK 3 a try, and never did…
And when you say iBook, please mean **eBook **because while the wifey has an iPad, I’m mostly on Android with my Kindle Fire and Nexus 10. I’ve already seen one iBook come out on modeling (Pushing Points or some such) that everyone complained was not available in ANY other platform. The author has yet to port it to anything else.
I can also highly recommend Serif.com’s wonderfully priced Page Plus package](http://www.serif.com/pageplus/) for authoring eBooks; you author your book once and you can generate PDFs, ePubs and HTML all from the same source document. A great package for anyone looking to create quality documentation for their wares.
Please do consider a UE4 book in whatever form - I learn best when I can relax offline and read in a nice chair and highlight-up the pages like crazy for later reference!
-Will
I’m no means official, but as someone else said, I write books. I have 4 new ones in the pipeline soon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Art-Unreal-Engine-Blueprints/dp/1500213101/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409871557&sr=8-1&keywords=master+the+art+of+unreal+engine+4
Awesome, what other books do you have planned outside of Blueprints specifically?
UMG, Matinee, C++, I’m hoping to cover every part of Unreal Engine 4.
I’m also working on “So You Want To Make Video-Games?” which covers everything from inital design to production (Within Unreal Engine 4 and beyond!)
I am hearing-impaired and I can’t watch video tutorials because they don’t have closed captioning. People who created video tutorials won’t add closed captioning to them. YouTube’s “Automatic Captioning” often displays words that are wrong. E-Books would be very helpful for me.
Ahem…Imo if Epic teams up with large video tutorials publishers (cough Digital Tutors cough) that would be so, so great. I know DT is pushing UE4 tutorials very aggressively but I think UE4 deserves same amount of love what Unity got while back 