The topic of The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide is shader development and management, and therefore it is written for any developers who have some interest in being efficient at using and integrating shaders within their applications. This book is written to serve as both a teaching and reference manual, making it a must-have to everybody from hobbyist programmers to professional developers. The approach taken throughout The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide makes it the perfect book for anyone who wants to integrate shaders into their application and take advantage of the power of the DirectX effect framework and the HLSL shading language.
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Just recently acquired a copy of ... and I must say, it delivers *exactly* what the title implies. -- Tom Miller (http://blogs.msdn.com/tmiller/archive/2006/02/06/526118.aspx)
About the Author
Sebastien St-Laurent holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Sherbrooke University in Quebec (Canada) where he graduated at top of his class in 1999. Since then, he worked on many video game titles including: Space Invaders, Dave Mira Freestyle BMX, Dave Mira Freestyle BMX2, Aggressive Inline, BMX XXX. Sebastien is now currently employed with the Microsoft Corporation where he is a graphics developer for the Microsoft Game Studios. Sebastien St-Laurent is also a published author who has written "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" and is currently working on his next title and doing some editorial work for the upcoming ShaderX4 book.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A worthy reference book for developers already working with shaders,
This review is from: The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide (Paperback)
This makes a good companion reference to the DirectX SDK. The HLSL Intrinsic Function Reference included as an appendix is especially good, citing the supported shader versions and performance considerations for each entry.
If you're just getting started with Direct3D or shaders, then this is probably not the right book for you (instead, check out "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" by the same author). Although this book does cover some bare-bones and basic shaders, it's probably better to use this book if you are looking for reference information not found in the SDK. Also note that this book is based on the Summer 2004 DirectX SDK. The best parts of the book are still absolutely current, but it would be wise to keep a copy of the latest SDK docs handy just in case.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good guide,
By Cody "damda" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide (Paperback)
This book starts out by giving you a good history behind the shader language.
Pro: - really good for references - it lists every single variables/functions for the shader along with the description - excellent information/reference on Intrinsic Functions - it has a good list of vertex shader 3.0 assembly instructions Con: - need more samples? :) Overall, I found this book is good to start learning HLSL. Besure that you've grabbed a concept of direct3d before reading this book. I also find out that after reading this book it's so much easy to read wolf's books.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible book,
By
This review is from: The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide (Paperback)
If you intend to use this book to learn HLSL or Cg, I strongly advise against it. It could be a reasonable reference book, but definitely not a book for learning.
First of all, the writing is terrible. Grammar errors everywhere make tons of descriptions hard to comprehend. Second, incorrect examples everywhere. I suggest the author should at least cut and paste his codes from working programs. Give some examples: - All the bold fonted ID3DXEffect** effect intefaces in Chapter 11 were mis-spelled. It should contain one single I in all these D3DEffect**, not Double I. (The author had it wrong for all of them, i.e. IID3DXEffect** throughout the entire chapter.) - page 46, Function name is called "lighing" while the caller site called "light(.." This program will not work. - page 54, COLOR0 was defined as a float2, while the Color returned by function Light_PointSpecular is returned as a float4. - page 58, function Light-PointDiffuse, the hyphen was written as a underscore in the caller site. In the same example, Light1_Color was used as an argument (so does the example in page 60), however, it was not defined anywhere in the code other than used as an passing argument. to name a few ...
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Welcome to The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
pipeline render states, stage state controls, declaration for this function, shader version, shader instruction set, vertex shader model, render state controls, structure member parameter, exp instruction, flow conrol, next valid technique, this render state, shader hardware, native hardware support, scripting annotations, static branching, matrix float, shader code, distance based attenuation, endrep block, above shader, typedef matrix, shader assembly, instruction slots, pixel shader Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Minimum Shader Version, Guide Table, Assembly Instructions Name Description Slots Type, Members Function Description, Output Final Color Out, Visual Studio, Get Vector Gets, Set Vector Sets, Set Vert New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Welcome to The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
pipeline render states, stage state controls, declaration for this function, shader version, shader instruction set, vertex shader model, render state controls, structure member parameter, exp instruction, flow conrol, next valid technique, this render state, shader hardware, native hardware support, scripting annotations, static branching, matrix float, shader code, distance based attenuation, endrep block, above shader, typedef matrix, shader assembly, instruction slots, pixel shader Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Minimum Shader Version, Guide Table, Assembly Instructions Name Description Slots Type, Members Function Description, Output Final Color Out, Visual Studio, Get Vector Gets, Set Vector Sets, Set Vert New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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