Originally very excited about the book

Many other reviews covered this but I will briefly restate what others have said.

PROS (not many)
- Easy reading book.
- Doesn't assume too much on the part of the reader. DirectX basics that are used was covered, etc.
- I don't agree with all of the control messaging system but the author's coverage/design is not too bad.

CONS
- As stated before, code in book does not match code on CD. Code on CD has some compilation issues that upon investigation are fairly straight forward to fix. Fixing requires knowledge beyond the basics of programming.
- The compiled executable examples, with very little happening on the screen, run very very poorly. I believe one of the basic issues with performance is with the overall design. That's a problem because then the book is pretty much useless. I suppose to be fair the writer might have been targeting a larger audience and not just gamers. WM_PAINT posted messages are done. That's slow. No respecting game engine will post paint messages, they will gain full control over rendering the window or full screen and "talk" directly to the Direct 3D device interface.
- (This one is personal) I do not like the coding style. Also, anytime a C++ programmer use "this->" the "this" pointer within the object itself doesn't fully understand that you don't need to fully qualify the pointer.

If you're looking for decent code with somewhat decent comments then save yourself some money and just download the DirectX SDK. In it, you will get many examples of UI things. Microsoft created a CustomUI application which runs very, very fast and handles GUI things very similarly to this book. But Microsoft's runs much faster. The problem with that is you won't find a very detailed writeup on "why" things are done the way they are. At least I haven't found it.

Other Reviews

• Source Code too simple and of little value for a real game.
• Originally very excited about the book
• Dissapointing
• Good job at teaching GUI, but code is bad
• I really wanted this book