Do not believe the negativity

I can understand some of the bad reviews because a few of the variable names are inconsistent from text to source code; but that is really the only thing wrong with the book. The code is very clear and follows the chapters well. The explanations of code are adequate for a 300pg book and you really don't need to go more in-depth if you are a beginner. I feel that most of the bad reviews are by people who let small inaccuracies cloud their mind, who cannot problem-solve very well, or who feel like they should be able to read the book once through and understand everything. There are no actual errors that I could find in the code since it compiled fine, they are simply typos. The reason I can say this is actually a good beginner book is because I read through the book thoroughly. Every time I start one of the sections I read the section while I type the whole program from the beginning and then I repeat the section several times keeping good coding practices in mind.

MISCONCEPTIONS UNRAVELED...

The source code is not written using the best practices, it is written with readability in mind. So feel free to throw all the DirectX stuff into its own singleton class.

The whole message loop fiasco that a couple of others wrote about is explained in the book (maybe try reading instead of skimming). It was very clear to me what the author did.

The code solutions are for VS7 which was standard at the time of publishing. So you need to use VS7 or later, I have VS8.

The book is only 300 pages so you will have to use the CD source code.

You have to compile the source code to use it, no executables are provided. And I can assure you the code _WILL_ compile.

CONCLUSION...

This is a good book to learn DirectX9.0c if you are a beginner. Skip it if you are more advanced. I haven't found any better books to learn DirectX since I really don't like the Wordware collections.

Other Reviews

• Out Dated an Incomplete.
• Begining DirectX 9.0
• Do not believe the negativity
• Old Edition