Customer Reviews

DirectX 8 and Visual Basic Development

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I am disappointed in this book because it is little more than a warmed-over version of the VBSDK for DirectX 8. Here are some specific weaknesses:

1. Much of the sample code is taken directly from the SDK samples with little value-added information.
2. No CD with the book
3. Key concepts are not extended beyond the SDK examples. This is particularly notable for the Direct3D section concerning lights, matrices, and vertices.
4. Many advanced topics are dealt with in an extremely light-weight manner. We are told that matrices are hard to understand and that classes are cool because they make programming easier.
5. Too many lightweight topics are covered. For example, we are told the value of having good error handling and knowing how to debug.

I think the book essentially suffers from lack of focus. Authors take note! Write a disclaimer at the beginning saying you must be a VB master to continue and then give us the hard stuff! Books are too short to cover everything, you must pick your audience carefully. There is no way this book can be for developers that do not understand error handling while simultaneously trying to teach advanced multimedia programming.

I just finished this book and not sure if I learned anything that wasn't already in the SDK documentation. I understand that writing a book would be hard, but it seems that they almost copied the information. There is another VB book that deals with DirectX by Crooks [...] that is very good as it helps you to build a complete game including all the 3D models, sound effects and other misc. items. You should buy that book instead -- Just MHO!!!![....]

I just want to warn anyone intersted in this book that this is a book about visual basic 6 and not VB.NET. It seems like the site has now been updated but my invoice, order confirmation, and cached pages all display it as VB.NET. Now that I have it in my hand I can see that this is not the case. There is a section at the back of the book that talks about VB.NET a little bit but all the code in the book is VB6. Don't get burned.

I agree with Paul asarak's comment. This book has a lot of pasted stuff from MSDN and from DX SDK help files, it has no cd, you need to download the examples from sams' website and there are some examples you need to type in the computer in order to test them.

This book is as if you were ready a tale, tells how everything is supposed to work, but SURPRISE!: the color and gamma controls from DD are not supported by all video cards, but the book doesn't tell you that.

It has a poor explanation in issues like the parameters that the calls to DX take in the example code. Since it has the same tables of methods and other stuff taken from MSDN, if the explanation of the MSDN didn't clear your doubts the tables in this book won't. I don't know about the others, but I feel a lack of explanation in DD.

If you've already fought your way through the maze that the many DirectX parameters are, it's behavior and have learned the basis of it, you may feel a little dissapointed. Anyway you must take in account that sometmes you may want to have another source of information when trying to understand DX, besides the MSDN and the internet.

I was looking in the directX help file and noticed that the lessons in this book are copied from the SDK's help file with the names of the variables changed. Imagine how mad I am to realize I just paid $50 for samples I already had. Isn't this against the law?

This is by far the worst purchase I have ever made. It goes to show that you shouldn't buy a book based on a table of contents alone. The author's code is weak at best. He explains 1/4 of the primitive code he writes and then throws in variables with no acknowledgement. In his discussion of directPlay he fails to mention the need to implement any interfaces. I've been teaching the database side of app developement for years, and if I can read a book and still be no better for it, it stinks.

This book is lacking for more descriptive code examples. Let's face it,most of us learn from step by step examples, and this is where the book lacks. Theory seems to be lacking also. After going through the book I was not able to write a 3D graphics program without copying the authors code line for line (by the way they did not work either). It talks about general theory but is severely lacking on the details of what each line of code does. Therefore leaving the reader not understanding the core concepts so closing the book and writing a 3D program is not possible.

Keith Sink, DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development (Sams, 2002)

It's 2003, now, and the world is slowly migrating to Microsoft's .NET standard (well, those who aren't using Linux, anyway). Here's a prediction, built on past observation of the process: companies who have been developing apps in Visual Basic for years will get copies of VB.NET, expecting a no-brainer transition from one to the other. Their programmers will import the programs, and immediately die of massive aneurysms at seeing the number of errors (especially the number of seemingly unfixable errors, if you happen to be programming in DirectX or any other API where classes expose other modules, which is verboten in .NET's "managed code" environment). This will leave the companies stranded and unwilling to move to .NET. They will be stuck behind those companies whose programmers have read DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development.

Keith Sink's book was written at the perfect time, and he often goes step by step through processes both writing code for VB6 and for VB.NET, making the book an invaluable resource for .NET VB programmers who are converting VB6 programs (or who are programming in an area where there are far more VB6 books than .NET books, which is, well, just about every area you can think of). Even if you're not planning on using DirectX, seeing the way things transition from one language to the other in one aspect of the language should give you a clue on how to make the transitions in other areas.

Sink doesn't mention at any point that there's actually a Microsoft.DirectX library in .NET. But then, neither does Microsoft's documentation. Nor does its upgrade wizard. (I only found about it after asking a random question on a message board.) So it's hard to fault Sink for something that, at the time he was writing, may have not been in the framework, or may have been considered an unsolvable problem. That aside, Sink's book is, for the reasons mentioned above, the best I've read to date about Visual Basic .NET at all. For such a specialized book to be so generally useful puts it in a class by itself. ****

The book does cover DirectX, but the examples don't include any explanations or overviews. It simply states the methods and how to declare them, it doesn't tell you WHY you use them, or when you would want to use them. Reads more like a reference than a learning tool.

Im about halfway throught the book (just finish the section of the book on graphics programming with directX8). I think the book's weakest point was its lack of example code on a CD (although their was some downloadable code on the book's site that wasn't hard to find). One "complete" project with all the skills the book taught would have been helpful. The book progressed in a logical order and was easy to follow and interesting to read. The code in the text was somewhat repetitive and would have been easier to put it once and have more examples on CD/available for download. Overall though, it isn't half bad and is good introduction to DirectX.