Core 2D game engine, book recommendations?

Hi all,

I am looking for a decent book or two on game development for someone with fair OOP programming experience.

The book should give guidance on the the following subjects:
* What to do in the core game loop?
* Handling animations (in the core game loop).
* Handling events, or triggered events.
* Something about artificial intelligence --> Path finding.
* Ideally, some tips about multiplayer integration.
* Going about with various exceptions (which makes the game).
* Working with tilemaps.
* Enemies moving on a tilemap + pathfinding.
* All of the above in a OOP approach.
* preferred is the main focus design of above, with code examples.

Basically a book which can show me how to make a core (resuseable) game engine for use in 2D side scroller games. It should be kinda lnaguage agnostic: a decent programmer should be able to grasp the books contents, then apply it in Java, C#, BlitzMax or whatever.

Which books can you recommend? A book of <=7 days reading could get me up to speed.

One could "Google" lotsa bits-n-pieces 2gether from various sources which takes ages to try to organise as useable... My dayjob + worktraveltime etc leaves me with very few spare hours per week(end) for puzzling out code etc. A decent structured book can get me up to speed much faster. Preferred is a Java-related book.

I have a fair programming ability in the past 8 years working in business software in banks/transportation/utilities etc etc.

Any ideas? TIA.

[1680 byte] By [MichielE] at [2007-12-24]