Excellent on theory, weak progression of examples

I spend a LOT of time reading programming books for use in my own courses, gathering tidbits here and there for my exploration of game engine programming and rendering courses. So, I've spent about a month digging through this book off an on, and even was able to chat with the author, Greg Snook.

The only problem with this book is that Snook started with a complex, fully-featured engine, and then tried to explain the concepts using the finished engine, which means that even the first terrain example (in chapter 6) includes a quadtree. I wanted to see a simple wireframe example that demonstrates how to create the terrain vertices first, and then learn now to add materials and textures and other effects to the terrain.

Since the engine is already fully developed, the author had a hard time (it seems to me) presenting a simple example. I prefer to start with an early, crude example, and build on it. This book starts with the finished product and tries to use that. Unfortunately, since this is Snook's own engine, and it's not explained--just dropped on the reader--the topic of terrain building and rendering takes the back seat to the engine code.

The recommended level is Intermediate, but this is clearly a book for an Advanced reader because one must dig through the engine to find the code for creating the vertex data for a terrain system.

Other Reviews

• dated and dangerous
• Programming is not for the lazy!!!!
• grinding code
• Excellent on theory, weak progression of examples
• Good book but fairly old