Zen book - no. no no no.

no.

What do you want to do / what level do you consider yourself?

You might want to look at Microsoft''s DX9 book.

Look at the book reviews here on GameDev. Two of these have been reviewed here. From what I''ve heard, both Beginning Direct3D Programming (1st ed. at least) and the Zen book were terrible. The second edition of Beginning D3D might be better though.

If you''re looking for a DX8 book, I would recomend Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX 8.0. I know the title sounds scary if you''re just starting out but it''s a Premier Press game dev book. All of those books are required to have a beginners section by the series editor (Andre LaMothe). This could be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. The point is that it''s probably one of the best intro books out there. Once you get through the beginning stuff (first 10 chapters) the book goes on to show you how to do some really cool looking stuff, like 3D water waves, particles, etc...

neneboricua

Strategy Game Programming With DirectX 9/2002 by our own LostLogic.

.lick

quote:Original post by Sean Doherty
Does anyone know anything about Real Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX?

Yes, it''s an excellent book! I own only two DX books, Special Effects... and Real-Time Rendering Tricks. I think that the latter picks up where the former left off.

Special Effects Game Programming does indeed cover a lot of good material, but is a little lacking when it comes to exploring all of the things that can be done with shaders. Real-Time Rendering Tricks goes after shaders with a vengance.

It has 13 (yes, count ''em, 13) chapters on vertex shader techniques. Many of these use some pixel shaders as well. Then there are another 3 on pixel shader techniques (Per-Pixel Lighting, Per-Pixel Lighting-Bump Mapping, and Per-Vertex Techniques Done Per-Pixel).

This is all on top of 16 chapters that explains how DX works (initialization, rendering, textures, lighting, etc...). The last 8 chapters of the book cover some other techniques that didn''t quite fit into any of the other areas. In that part of the book, there are things like Rendering to Textures, 2D Rendering, Image Processing with Pixel Shaders, DirectShow: Using Video as a Texture, Stencil Buffers, and Picking.

I haven''t read any DX9 books yet because I''ve just picked it up mainly from the SDK and and NVIDIA/ATI samples but far as DX8 books go, I think that Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX, and Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques are, in my opinion, the best ones out there.

neneboricua