   Allegro library
  Hey ladies and gents,I was just wondering what you guys thought of the allegro library? I recently bought a book on game programming (been trying to get into it for years but never found a resource I liked). I bought this book because I liked the author approached the subject and it was aimed at purely 2d games, which is essentially what I've been wanting to do.Needless to say the book uses the allegro library which is something I had never heard of, granted I am a total newb. What do you guys think about it? I don't necessarily mean on the learning-level but on it's efficiency and whether I should stick to it or move to another one once I'm comfortable with the game-programming-logic.Any thoughts? :)Thanks,Seb   
  If you bought the book by Jonathan Harbour, let me warn you that there are some mistakes in it and a few bad practices such as using <conio.h> and void main().Allegro is a great library. It suffers a bit from legacy concepts, as it grew up on DOS. Some of the more modern features are slightly hacked on from the API perspective, although much of that will be improved in future versions. Lots of people use it (see Allegro.cc); it's probably second to SDL in terms of 2D general purpose "gaming" libraries.Functionally speaking Allegro + Addons is pretty much the same as SDL + Addons. SDL's API is cleaner; Allegro comes with more things built-in. There are also some fundamental differences between how they handle things (polling vs events), so your best bet is to try both out and see which one you prefer.Neither one will really limit your options. In the end, it will be your own skill that determines what kind of games you produce.   ;  Thanks a lot :)At first I was confused seeing how SDL means something else to software engineering students ;-)I'll definatly check it out.Seb   