I can certainly agree with the fact that the book doesn't provide an introduction to C++ / basic computer graphics, although I think including many entry level concepts would water down the content a little too much, and never bringing any of them to a mature level might be confusing too. I tried to write the book that I would have wanted when I started out, but I suppose that concept means different things to different people.

Still I will take the critique - I can always plan for updates on a second edition sometime down the road +1 for each of the feedback posts!

I also saw that review a little while back, and have thought about how best to handle the topic. I think utilizing the 3D engine to build the samples is the best way to keep the code relevant and continue to support it. Typically people complain about the opposite problem - that the code is dumped by the author and never touched again. In our case, I have found and fixed several fairly large bugs in the sample code, and have also made general efficiency improvements to the way that some mechanisms in the engine work.

The second half of the book (where the sample algorithms are described) is careful to describe the algorithms and the shader code, but not to discuss the engine mechanisms for carrying out those algorithms. This is an explicit choice, and was done to allow general improvements to be made while keeping the code in sync with the book. That review complained that I had removed the boost dependency - but that is a good thing! There was no functional difference in the samples, but there was about 70 mb less dependency... The code is being updated, but not updated without consideration of the book.

In addition, other samples are added to the code base that show topics that aren't covered in the book. For example, I have recently added an MFC sample that shows how to interact with D3D11 and MFC, and also added a Kinect sample. There is lots of things that can't fit into a book, but are still worth conveying to your audience. In this case I think if we didn't update the code, then people would complain in 1-2 years that the code was getting stale and out of date... I would take a functional reference over a static snapshot any day...

However, since the code is open sourced, and is available in an SVN repository, it is trivial to roll the clock back to the time of the book release. I will add instructions to the codeplex website to that effect - thanks for the suggestion!

One final thing - I also got my start by reading Dave's books, so it is a great honor to hear him make such a nice comment about our book!