What are some unity books that you own or have read and feel that other that want to learn unity must own. I am planing on buying three books from amazon and I want to make sure I pick the right ones.
I completed ‘Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials’ by Will Goldstone. In my opinion a very good book for beginners. I liked the fact that you have one game you work on throughout the whole book. Each new chapter adds new techniques to your skillset which you then immediately use to improve your project. Also a major plus for this book is the fact that you can use either JS or C# as scripting language since he lists his code in both languages.
I am now reading ‘Holistic Game Development with Unity’ by Penny De Byl. A good beginner’s book as well. She goes a little more into depth when it concerns the technical background of making a game (e.g. draw calls, animation,…). However, instead of having one project, she uses a whole bunch of small mini-projects to illustrate the different techniques (which, for me personally at least, doesn’t work as well). Also it is written using JS, so if you want to use C# (as I do) you’ll have to convert the code the book provides you with (but that isn’t be too big of a problem).
As for intermediate Unity books, so far I only found ‘Unity 3 Game Development Hotshot’ by Jane Wittayabundit. But I haven’t read it, so can’t say if it’s good or not.
Holistic Game Development was a real hodge podge of information. Nothing in depth enough to really use and her implementations were very hacky like, not something you would use in a real game.
As far as Unity 3 Hot Shot goes, the book is terrible, difficult to read, bad code, and weak examples. Not worth the paper it’s printed on. Unity 3.x scripting is just as bad.
The book by Will Goldstone is really the only good Unity book out there IMO, but that’s a beginners focused book and it will leave you wanting more.
I’m new to Unity and don’t know much about scripts or coding. I bought 2 books so far. The only one I think I am really benefiting from is the Unity 3x Game Development Essentials book by Will Goldstone.
Question for original poster: In another thread I see that you are taking some free Unity video courses. Which ones do you find the most beneficial for learning coding and Unity?
Hey learningthis,
A great place to start learning scripting in unity is with the walkerboysstudio.
http://www.walkerboystudio.com/html/unity_training___free__.html
Hope these help good luck and feel free to ask if you have anymore question 
Doesn’t directly answer your question, but you may find this useful : http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/Unity-Book-Roundup.aspx
It’s a complete ( I believe, let me know if I missed one ), list of all the books available for Unity, and most of the details you need to pick one all on a single page. That also includes the average amazon rank if you put stock in that.
As to the “Best” one, that really comes down to what you want to get from the book. Are you looking specifically for program details, art integration, use JavaScript or C#, etc.