games

I picked this book up about a year ago as it seemed to start from the beginning and cover much ground. Little did I know at the time that this would be the best book I'd find on the topic a year later. The coverage on shadow volumes and shadow maps is impressive. The discussion of things such as the depth buffer and stencil buffers is good. Plus having access to the various vertex and pixel shaders code made it easy to learn from just reviewing the code.

Outside of the SDK, this is the only D3D book that I continue to reference, even as I move to DirectX 9.

This book helped me understand vertex shaders and pixel shaders, which was the point of the book. The only thing I did not like about the book was that some of the code had bad logic. But its very readable code and I must give the guy props, he must have coded this super fast. Plus his chapter on video was werid and hard to understand and the code was akward and to me was out of place in the book. It had way to much source code and no explaination of why it works. His other book on curves was good too ... check it out.

Hi! I guess I'll start by saying what do you have to know and have in order to benefit from the material covered in this book. First of all, you must have some experience in win32 programming under windows, because the author does show you the code required for your app to work, but doesn't explain it. Second, you have to have a VC++ 6.0 compiler and Dx8.0 RunTime/SDK to compile and write any sample programs. Third, you have to know some Object Oriented Programming, such as classes and pointers. And the last thing you have to have is the enthusiasm to fuel your work. Now on to the review. The author provides very good and clear examples, as well as very much actual code needed to accompish them. The book teaches D3D from top to bottom, everything from simple polygons to complex model loading and pixel/vertex shaders! I must go ahead and agree with the 1st review that this book has everything the "Special Effects" book lacked. By this I mean it doesn't just give you function prototypes and leaves you stuck by fuguring out what to put in them, it actually provides very good and concise code. So if you really want to start learning power of D3D at its best, for your apps/games/anything you better go ahead and grab this book! This will skyrocket you skills to the next level. I highly recommend this book for beginning gamedevelopers!(like me). With the huge incomes in entertainment industry in the future you will place yourself in a very good position.