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Sams Teach Yourself DirectX 7 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- Hours) Review by J. DEATS
Worth three stars
This book has a lot of negitive reviews, I would like to point out some things. Unlike many of the other "beginner" books on DirectX (take Windows Game Programming for Dummies as an example). This book does make a great effort to attempt to cover all aspects of DirectX, and devotes much of it's text to Direct3D. Nost books only cover select topics, most are broken up to: DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectPlay.. or just Direct3D, this book attempts to do all this in 24 hours.
The 24 hour bit can be a bit misunderstood. One can take it to mean a cover to cover read knowing nothing about topic or related topics in 24 hours (and this is very unrealistic) or one can assume the total reading time of the book will be 24 hours, this doesn't account for personal research and experimenting on the topics discussed.
The book does only touch on many of it's topics, it could not be part of the "24 hour" book series if it did not, and you can read this book in 24 hours, providing you also add in at least 4 hours of further research (though the DirectX SDK documentation and samples) and personal experimenting for each hour of read time, you CAN walk away learning quite a bit.
Learning DirectX takes effort and hard work, if you want a hand-holding book the ..for Dummies book I mention above is fantastic, if you want a good over-view of DirectX 7 that assumes you know what a computer is, what a compiler is, how to program in C++, etc... get this or some other more specialized book on DirectDraw or Direct3D.
Only 3 stars because there are some errors in the text and samples and it can be a bit misleading as most readers of the "24 hour" books may be expecting something a lot more stright-forward.