Customer Reviews

The Awesome Power of Direct3D/DirectX - The DirectX 7 Version

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Generally when I read reviews on Amazon.com that simply say "This book is horrible, don't waste your money", I tend to ignore them. I find that probably half the people posting the reviews don't know how to program anyway, and so when they see a few lines of code they freak out and automatically decide the book sucks. That's the reason I bought this book, because not many of the reviews actually backed up their complaints with valid arguments. I have a slightly higher opinion of the book than most of the other reviewers, but I still find the book to be fairly bad. Specifically, the author has got to have some of the worst general programming skills I've ever seen. Maybe I'm spoiled because I'm a professional in the games industry, where code is usually very clean, efficient, and professional looking, but the code in this book is just absolute garbage. Every time I look at his code I get sick to my stomach. Some of the stupidest things I've seen in this book include (but are not limited to), the following:

1) The use a global "Info" object to describe the state of D3D and the window. Even though it's global, the author uses SetWindowLong() to attach it to the window "so that it's always accessible". I've never seen anything so ridiculous in my life.

2) The use of static C functions ALL OVER THE PLACE. Not static class member functions, but plain old static C functions (not that the use of static member functions all over the place would be any better, but I don't think I've ever used a static C function in my life). In fact, the sole PURPOSE of declaring a non-member function static is so that it's not visible from any other file, so that you can use the same function name in other files. I really hope I don't need to explain why that's bad.

4) The inconsistency used throughout the book. Sometimes return values are compared to D3DRM_OK, sometimes SUCCEEDED()/FAILED() is used. He may as well not indent his code at all either, because sometimes he indents line and sometimes he doesn't. All in all it's very inconsistent, and I've decided that I absolutely hate looking at his code. If I ever had to work with this guy I'd probably beat him with a 2x4 for making my life hell.

5) The way in which he wrote the main windows message loop was probably the dumbest implementation I've seen. It was just downright silly.

6) The use of the hPrevInstance parameter to WinMain(). Anybody who's ever done anything for windows knows that this parameter is always NULL under Win32.

7) The way the code on the CD is COMPLETELY out of sync with the book. He uses code from the way later chapters very early on, and code from the early chapters later on, while the chapters mention nothing of this code. It's clearly not supposed to be there, and not alot of work was put into making sure the CD was correct.

8) The way he wrote his CreateLight() function. Of all the bad programming habits I've found in this book, this one was just flat out absurd, and makes it blatantly obvious that he's never worked on anything high performance. There are 5 types of light, and he wanted to write a generic CreateLight() function that would create any of the 5 types, based on a parameter. So he decides to pass in a *STRING*, which was ASSUMED to be one of the following: "DIRECTIONAL", "SPOT", "POINT", "PARALLELPOINT", or "AMBIENT". Every time I think about this I laugh. I really don't think there's a more inefficient way to do this, especially considering that Direct3D already comes with an enum specifically for specifying the type of light to create.

Now that I'm done ranting about this guy's pathetic ability to write C/C++ code, I guess I should say that he does give a fairly good explanation of *SOME* aspect of Direct3D. Not many, but some. As most people have said, most is pulled directly out of the SDK docs, verbatim. Not one changed word. Some of the stuff, however, is actually explained in a mediocre fasion.

I'm going to finish reading this book because I've already bought it, but for everybody else who is considering buying it, please don't. There have GOT to be better books out there. I'm actually learning the material because I'm a good enough programmer to where I can figure out how to rework his trash into something neat, clean and efficient, but I would much rather have just purchased a book where it CAME neat, clean, and efficient.

It may be true that this book is not easy to read, there are BIG advantages of this book:

1: animation: by reading this book, reader can easily import 3D animation sequence. This is usually a tedious work without high-level animation implementation.

2: collision detection: basic idea of collision detection and code examples are included. Collision detection is usually hard for a beginner to implement but this book present a working example of collision detection.

Beginner 3d programmer will find these features very useful, because none of other popular APIs such as Direct3D immediate mode nor OpenGL does not give any examples of animation import and collision detection.

Moreover, the book does not hide any thing to make win32 3d-program, while elegant C++ codes often hide implementation purposely. Hiding implementation prevent readers to extend or modify the codes even when they need to do so.

Game industry persons may hate this book because readers will able to program 3d graphic easily, which may not be welcome to current professionals.

This book really has some good stuff in it and for someone who doesn't know where to start in rendering a 3D environment, moving around it, adding collision detection, special FX - including lighting, sounds, animation sets, loading pre-built 3D objects into your world and adding textures & mipmaps it's great. It shows many other features of Windowed mode and immediate mode programs, and will greatly enhance your knowledge of creating advanced 3D virtual environments. The main problem this book has is a lot of the code in the book is snippets from the accompanying CD so the only way to understand which parts of the program the code is from is by loading the appropriate chapters from the CD and searching for it. I will agree with an earlier comment that the section on terrain creation is not very well explained and the code is a nightmare to understand. It's not all bad though because this book is definitely worth a read. Your knowledge will be increased from none to huge amounts within a few days of reading and fiddling with the code. All round this book is worth having in your pogramming library.

I decided to buy this book after I finished reading the introduction and first chapter. But little I knew how messed up the code in this book is. I haven't really look into the DirectX documentation yet so I am not going to comment on that. But I do believe people saying that part of the book is "cut and paste" from somewhere else, they just don't make sence at all... I started notice the problem in Chapter 2 where there are quite a bit of typo and wrong information about the CD. Once I get into Chapter 3. This situation become worse, there are tones of code segment which I have no idea where to put. I could never find any makefileX in any directory (according to the book). What kind of publisher or author is this? At least they should take some time to check the consistency between the code and the CD... I DO NOT recommend this book !

Its a book thats aimed for a person who has a lot of time to waste in the understanding of code not making any sense, especially the code pertaining to terrain generation, which is very confusing and without any explanation. Secondly this book focuses basically on the retained mode and just copies the documentation of DirectX5 SDK help for immediate mode. One good thing about it is code and explanation handling of joystick and sound. Apart from it I don't find it any more useful. One can learn better reading the SDK help and code for other things.

This book is nothing more than a rewrite of the D3D SDK documents. Funny it mentions the chrome wrap feature but never expalins how to implement it. There is a good reason for that and that is because the book is a word for word reprodection of the SDK, the SDK doesn't expalin how to use the chrome wrap either! No one writing code for D3D is writting a book they're too busy developing apps and Games. Sorry but its true you got to learn D3D the hard way and that is by doing and reading the poorly written MS SDK docs. At least the SDK docs are free!

This is the best book on directx, on the bookshelves to date! If you've ever wanted to learn to use Directx to program for games, walk throughs, well just about anything this is the book you need. The author keeps up a great web sit where you can download more scenes and any updates to the CD. The source files are well documented and the author has been kind enough to even help me out a couple of times when I ran into a problem trying to come up with a new feature! So if your looking for a book to get started using Directx look no further, cause you've found it!

I review this book 6 months ago but i think the guys of Amazon didnt post it cause yeh i think was very bad hehe :-) but i'll review again this book, i hope they post this one. Ok here we go, I cant talk about the author cause his a nice person but about his book yeh, People belive or not this book its a totally "*f" its a waste of time and money(bucks)!. Why i say this, cause first, the book its so messy, the concepts of the chapters are so messy, this book i think didnt have a correction of spelling, are errors all over the book about the code , i think this book was writed from the SDK "Copy and Paste" also 400 or something of pages are the exaclty the SDK of it, Also watch out Direct3D RM will be no support it in the next release of DirectX, so RM its dead. you will not learn anything about 3d game programing or 3d Graphics , nothing belive or not thats the true, well i'll stop cause i need to go but i could speak about ti all the night, think about it its your choice :-).

The book is 820 pages. Wow! but 466 pages is reference (SDK)... It's very hard to compile some of his exemple. The book contain almost nothing about Immediate Mode, and he mix everyting with DirectInput and DirectSound. Do not buy it if you have the SDK!

Peter Kovachs book is the current best book for Direct 3D that is or has been published Period. I know, I have them all. If you can program in C at all and any familiarity with the Windows interface, this book can take you from beginner to highly capable Direct3D retained mode programmer.

In addition, it covers sufficient advanced concepts and I/O to enable you to construct your own initial 3D game programs.

It also has an intro to Direct3D retained mode, but it is not sufficient by itself to qualfy you as a retained or combined mode programmer. It is also out of date now as DirectX 6 and 7 include several enhancements.

Sometimes it is necessary to re-read several times and to experiment in order to fully grasp what Peter is teaching you, but Direct3D is a monstrous and powerful beast (why do you think books with impressive titles like "DirectX Complete" skip talking about Direct3D completely) Main reason, D3D has more to it than the entire rest of DirectX put together, and they dont know how to use it either.

I'm sure his new book Inside Direct3D will be even better, I have it on preorder.

You want to program Direct3D. This book will get you started and give you some good tools to work with.