Customer Reviews

DirectX®, RDX, RSX, and MMX™ Technology: A Jumpstart Guide to High Performance APIs

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is extremely well-written and useful, barring a few unimportant typos. Not only are the title acronyms explained thoroughly, but the book goes into Pentium optimization and other topics. It is an interesting hodgepodge of new and exciting ideas and technologies.

This book is an excellent way to get into the nitty-gritty of low-level API programming. I was very impressed with RSX/RDX, which I hadn't seen yet, and it had one of the best tutorials on Direct3D Immediate Mode I've seen. There examples are well written, and they don't water-down the APIs with un-needed wrapper classes. They also go into detail on how to profile your application to improve performance in critical areas. All-in-all, this is the best book on DirectX I've seen, and an excellent introduction to other multimedia APIs!

NOTE: This is for more experienced developers, but if you have a handle on basic 2D/3D graphic concepts, C/C++, and some assembly language, you can handle anything they throw at you.

This books extolls a lot of the things that are hidden in the official DirectShow documentation from Microsoft. It explains the A-Z procedure in order to build effective source/transform/renderer DirectShow filters. It's suitable for both the beginner and the intermediate. The experts would download the lately added articles and keep thinking this book is a masterpiece.

I got this book because of its Directshow chapters. The book says "Jumpstart Guide" and it is true that starts describing basic concepts like progressive and interlaced frames. However, a few pages later assumes you know all about DirectX. The book tell you that all explanations about installing and interfacing filters are in the CD, but the CD, that is oriented to Visual C 5 and DirectX 4, doesn't match the book at all (i.e. the examples are different) and has even empty files. I don't know about the other chapters, but the Directshow and filter creation chapters are a waste of time. The Microsoft SDK is a lot less pain, assumes you don't know what they explain you, and it is free.

Above and beyond the treatment of multimedia topics I found the P/P-Pro/PII and MMX discussions very interesting. I started ASM programming because of this book. This book will hopefully be revised with 3DNow! and Katmai extensions included next year. I hope to see more books from Intel people ;-).

An excellent source of material which isn't covered anywhere else. I needed to create a DirectShow source and rendering filter and this is the only book I found which even mentioned the topic. Between the SDK and this book I was able to make 100% more headway than I had before reading the book.

This is the kind of book I find to be great. It is concise to get you started and provides enough info to get you going on the topic and then ways to get performance out of the technologies. I really like this book. I have been doing DirectX development for about a year now and still found this book to be an excellent reference on multimedia programming topics. My only complaint is that the book is intended more for beginners and not enough advanced discussions (the chapter usually stops at the meaty parts...) but still I recommend this book alot. Good!

Although some of the error messages one can get are misleading, the examples do work. After a pleasent exchange with one of the authors, I was able to get my copy of the demos to work. Kudos to Rohan Coelho. I tried the websight recently and I guess Addison Wesley's web people got their act together because it is now working. Hopefully, my issues and any more that other people experience will make their way onto the site. The book is a solid guide to some useful graphics programming techniques.

I tried to access the website they list as containing more info about their book. It doesn't exist. I tried to access it because some of there examples don't work, and I wanted to see if any patches or bug fixes are available. But I guess I am stuck.

Have a great information about CPU and also Multimedia APIs,but the examples doesnt work and everything is writing in C++,I dont know why they didnt use C like Directx APIs are writing in C (Im Taliking about directx others are well writing in assembly!).Anyway im happy with the book but tend to Beginners.