I never cared for the Sams books. While I haven''t read the new "Teach Yourself" series, I did read Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus a while ago. (The guy teaches you how to build a Wolfenstein engine, if that gives you a clue to its age.)

It wasn''t that impressed with it. The examples weren''t that well done and the author skipped over huge tracts of knowledge, dismissing it with a simple, "Uh, just use this library and don''t ask how it works." Heck, I knew more about game programming than the author did, at that point I was still hammering out games in QuickBASIC and Pascal.

About the only useful stuff was the introduction to raycasting and the example code for that.

I''ve always considered Sams to be a sort of "budget" series of knowledge books. I''ve bought a few of their other books and really didn''t glean that much from them.

Currently, I''ve got Realtime Rendering. While it hasn''t got a single line of (real) code in it, I''ve learned a lot more about the underlying mechanics of 3d than by any paint-by-the-numbers self-help book. Between RTR and the DirectX SDK (plus a smattering of Google-found tutorials), I''ve got what I need.

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[[ Gaping Wolf Software ]]

I was thinking about buying this book to learn Direct3d. It seems to me pointless to learn DirectDraw if it is outdated and practically obsolete. However I am struggling to find good DirectX 8.0 or 9.0 tutorials online and Im not sure which is a good book to buy. I have Lamothe tricks book but this book also uses DirectDraw. Can anyone recommend any good books to make a 2d game using Direct3d?

quote:Original post by codepunk
cplusplus_cpp.age < 16 <--- true

I actually happen to be an author of 2 SAMS books. Why don''t you write one so I can see how it should be done.

I don''t think somebody''s age should ever drive them to post something that incredibly stupid. There are plenty of young people that visit these boards that usually get help appropriatly if they need it, and maybe even help some others.

Anyways, what books have you written? And I would love to try to write a book, but there really isn''t anything out there on how to get into that. I think it would be a good experience.

quote:Original post by circlesoft
I don't think somebody's age should ever drive them to post something that incredibly stupid. There are plenty of young people that visit these boards that usually get help appropriatly if they need it, and maybe even help some others.

Like me, for example.

EDIT: More to the actual point, thinking that the publisher somehow affects the quality of the book is inherently stupid to begin with.



[edited by - coWsaRenOtevIl on December 20, 2003 12:24:39 PM]