I just got Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus by Andre LaMothe. It has two chapters (2 and 3) devoted to Win32 SDK programming then goes on to DirectX. It also has some really neat chapters on AI and general game concepts later in the book. I haven''t gotten that far but it looks good from skimming over it. You only really need to know a very small portion of windows programming to make games. The book comes with DirectX6.1 but if you want to go on to make 3D games you probably want to get DX8 or OpenGL from what I''ve heard.

I have also read most of Charles Petzold''s Programming Windows. You really only need to read the first 10 chapters to get the idea (you can skip a lot of boring stuff on character sets too).

Disclaimer: I am a newbie too (haven''t made a single game yet), so you might want to get some more feedback before you decide.

Also, as I mentioned before, if you want to go into 3D games you might want to buy a book that has DirectX8 or OpenGL on a companion CD.

Marshall

If you buy a book like LaMothe''s Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus, then you''ll learn enough to make a game. But somewhere down the line you''ll probably want to make map editors and such, in which case you''ll most likely need to use the Win32 API or MFC (unless you just code the utility in DirectX or OpenGL itself). So, I think there''s really no harm in learning the Windows API, as it can be useful.

If you want to learn it (although it isn''t absolutely necessary), I would recommend either Programming Windows by Charles Petzold (as mentioned above, very nice book) or Windows 98 Programming from the Ground Up by Herbert Schildt (doesn''t cover as much, but is still very good).

I went directly from a begining C book to the Windows Game Programming Gurus Book, and it worked out fine for me.

However, after I worked on programming games for a short while, I wished that i learned C a little better, just so that I could write more efficint code. Doing somthing like reading a good mid level C book would probobly help a lot.

lol