Customer Reviews

Win32 Game Developers Guide With Directx 3

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Absolutely the worst DirectX book ever written (so far) for the following reasons: 1. Obtuse explanations. 2. Poor writing style. Needed better outlining and "headings" for organizational purposes. 3. In my opinion, the worst class library ever developed in the history of class libraries. 4. Just pasted code sections of his horrible class library and went over it few lines at a time. 5. And speaking of code, he put some of the "ugiliest" code I have ever seen on those pages - what a waste of paper.

The good aspect of this book was it explained the basics of DirectX fairly well and easy to understand. What was important to me was understanding the basic concepts of DirectX and I like the book in that regards. The bad aspect of this book was some sections of the DirectX were not fully developed such as the DirectPlay section which could have used more examples. There were other sections I felt were not fully developed either but the biggest for me was the DirectPlay section. And the ugly aspect of this book was when I would compile (Borland C++) the books source code there would be several warnings and errors in the compilation. I would have to go manually into the source code and fix the bugs, this tended to make me a little angry at times. :

This is a terrible book on DirectX. It seems that the author doesn't want to teach you DirectX, but would rather just have you cut and paste his code into your program and use it without understanding how it works. Example: "We won't dig into code here; we'll just skim over it..."(166). That is no way to teach someone. He makes DirectDraw much more complicated than it really is. I do know a good bit of DirectX now, but no thanks to this book. Also, all of his programs are poor quality. I still consider myself a beginner DirectX programmer, but I can thow together better programs in one day, no joke, they're that bad!

Very interesting and covers everything I wanted to lear

Very interesting and covers everything I wanted to lear

This book covers the entire DirectX API very well. Although it doesn't go into EXTEREME detail, it's a very good overview and will give you a very good introduction.

From all appearances DirectX seems to be a extremely clumsy and tedious interface. The author works around this by wrapping all the DirectX details in his own classes. While this might be a good tactic if you are a progammer, it doesn't work when you are actually trying teach the DirectX interface. If his classes where very, very good then one might be tempted to just use them and forget about DirectX entirely. Unfortunately they are not that good.

I love this book. The author is able to deal with deep technical material in a casual manner, without a lot of the pretense and stuffiness others feel obliged to swim in (or hide behind). Top notch.

I love this book. The author is able to deal with deep technical material in a casual manner, without a lot of the pretense and stuffiness others feel obliged to swim in (or hide behind). Top notch.

I'm not sure about just what this book is trying to accomplish. The cover announces it as a guide to directX 3, however nearly the entire book deals with the author's "wrapper classes" with only sparse mention of actual DirectX or Direct3D functions or their theory. In addition to this, the author spread uses so many wrappers and typedefs, spread over so many files that you will find your self constanly asking, "what the hell does 'lpDD3DTHISHEADERISWAYTOOLONG' stand for? There are much better books on DirectX out there, skip this one.