Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Do yourself a favor and browse through it before you buy, June 2, 2001
By A Customer
Really, the title of my review says it all. Considering so many other people say it's a great book, it must have its merits but I sure can't see what they are. It's awfully written, it contains on average about one mistake per page, and I don't think it explains the concepts very well --on the contrary. It's incoherent, the index is awful (try looking up terms such as RGBA or RHW), and so is the printing.I strongly suggest you don't buy it based solely on its rating, as I did. Instead, browse through the book first and see if you like it. I wish I had done that...
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good information, November 20, 2001
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I've been waiting for a long time for a decent Direct3D book to refer beginners to, and this is one of the best so far. On the other hand, being the "best" among Direct3D books really isn't saying much, and this book is far from perfect.
Overall, this book covers a lot of good material, including some of the more advanced aspects of DX8, and the code itself is pretty solid. Unfortunately, the explanations can be a little hard to understand, partially due to the fact that the author isn't a native English speaker (the chapters on physics and collision detection don't suffer this problem, though, being written by someone else), so you may find yourself having to reread things several times.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who doesn't have some game programming and DirectX knowledge, but I would recommend it for someone who wants to get up to speed on the latest version of D3D, especially if they have used a previous version of Direct3D - or even another 3D API - or if they are willing to put the effort into working through the chapters to dig out the (truly useful) information they contain.
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25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't waist your time / money, December 21, 2002
By A Customer
This books is one of the most worthless titles ever to be released by a publishing company! Prima Tech editors should have seen it coming and scrapped this book before it ever hit the shelves. The book "Multiplayer Game Prgramming" by Todd Barren, a book designed to help you understand how to make multiplayer capable games, does a better job explaining DirectXGraphics (Direct3D8) than this trashy book does... This is a terrible waist of time. This book was reviewed by Game Developer Magazine, and explains a ton of mistakes, and complete inaccuracies...like:This book neglects to cover the most "revolutionary" features introduced in the DirectX8 SDK, vertex shaders and pixel shaders, but covers something as advaced as anisotropic reflection. So the shaders weren't left out because they were too complicated, who knows why they were left out! This book is littered with grammatical, technical, and formatting errors. Example: The exponants are left out of almost every equation in the book. Page 475 has 42 missing exponants.
The reviewer also noted that the description of 3d rotation is just plain WRONG!
Also this book contains an introduction to C++, not like many 3D programmers are going to need that.
The entire physics chapter is only 8 pages long, and the first 2 of those 8 focuse only on 3D math. The reviewer was obveously very unhappy with what he found in the book, just as I was. He gave it 1 out of 5 stars. Oh and by the way, the reviewer was Mark Deloura, a programmer who has worked with OpenGL and it's predecessors for more than 10 years now, and very well known / respected. Heed mine and Mark Deloura's warning, don't buy this book!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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by Trent Polack
