If you''re a beginner, ''The Black Art of 3D Game Programming'' It''s a bit old, and the code is written for dos, but the theory is excellent. If you want a more difficult book try ''3D Game Engine Design''. but beware this is a lot more technical and math intensive.

HHSDrum@yahoo.com

It''s simple, dont by books. It makes no sence that you would spend 50-60-70 bux on a book when all the information you need for the rest of your life is online. Honestly, I have about 50 computer books, but the only thing i''ve learnd from books was teh C++ language. Everything else I learned from the net. Books are good for reference. But its too damn expensive, when the info is online. Read the "NeHe" tuts and you are on your way. Don''t spend the money dude.

Reality Makes Me XIC
I hack code: passion is my feul. Use my programs, experience genius.
http://www.x-i-c.com/

Yet again I disagree with you. Online code and information is presented in a very non-linear manner. Often the code is written by beginners themselves, or it is just badly written. Other things to take into account are diffrences in coding style, C++ or C code, how things were implemented. "Optimizations" that often don''t actualy speed anything up at all.

A prime example is the NeHe Lessons. They are great, however most of them use the GLUT libraries, which no self respecting game programmer would ever do.

Books are for beginners, to fill in the gaps. Your not going to fully understand how to move things in 3d unless you have a brief overview of matrix math. And how to mathmeticaly translate, rotate, and scale. Where can you find information about that? Oh you need to go to a diffrent site...well ok, so let''s go to that other site, now I need to know what vectors are, where can I learn about them? Another site?!? well ok let''s go there. By the time you actualy get the information in the order you would have recieved it in a book, you could''ve finished 4 to 5 chapters of the book itself and been up and running.

The online tutorials (though are often a starting point) are better at teaching programmers who are up to the level where they can decypher it. Perhaps they are moving around from D3d to OpenGL, or vise versa. Or for those who''ve been working with 3d game engines previously and have been abstracted from the low level code.

You want to learn? You buy a book. You want to expand the knowledge you currently have? You read online tutorials, until you decide you need a book. If the web were so good in teaching what was needed, companies wouldn''t have huge libraries of books and internal documentation for their programmers to utilize.