I'm looking for some good resources / books on learning directx..

I've made a fixed pipeline opengl renderer earlier, but I've never implemented shaders before. I have read most of Real-Time Rendering (Möller, Haines and Hoffman) so I've got some theory..

I'm also planning to buy the CG shader tutorial book, but I'm after a book or a good resource on how directx works.. I'm working my way through the directx 11 sdk tutorials now..

http://legalizeadult...phics-pipeline/

is invaluable
(credit to legalize)

www.directxtutorials.com
[/quote]

should be www.directxtutorial.com

You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...

[quote name='Jason Z' timestamp='1327561934' post='4906344']
You could also take a look at our book: "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11". Even if you don't buy the book, you can still get the associated engine and sample programs on the Hieroglyph 3 codeplex site.

You need to buy this book. It is really good...
[/quote]

I have the book; i think it's useless for beginners.

Hello!
At first i am sorry for the short comment, i realized it's useless if not well explained.
I did not say i do not like your book, i just said that is (in my opinion) quite useless for beginners.
I think this book is best suitable for middle-knowledged D3D programmer.

The pipeline is explored with great detail (i learned some useful things from it), and works great for a beginner (even if i think that Tesselation shader stages are explained in the "standard way", and so very difficult to understand).
But the entire second part of the book (Mesh Rendering and so on) jumps directly to concepts and tasks extremely difficult for a beginner. Displacement Mapping? Vertex Skinning (very bad explained, in my opinion)? Dynamic Tessellation? Deferred Rendering?

The best way to start is Documentation and the Beginning DirectX series, in my opinion.


P.S.
Since i'm not a very good english writer, i just copied this text from amazon page of your book, where a guy gave a review that express very better what is in my brain.

"the material presented is accurate and well written, but it fails on too many fronts to be considered great. The first half of the book is dedicated to explaining the Direct3D 11 Pipeline or at least it tries to. What you get is ultimately a regurgitation of the freely available DX documentation. The authors do little to actually explain the behind the scenes workings and I have a feeling if it is your first foray into DX you will be quickly lost. The one bit of explanation they routinely throw at you is through the use of images to explain concepts. This sounds excellent until you realize what it really means. You get images like a cube with six exploded sides demonstrating a cube map (which is sadly one of the better images) and my personal favorite, an image of a sphere in three different positions to demonstrate translations. This examples may sound petty, but if you read this book you will constantly roll your eyes at the ridiculousness of these listings. Code listings for the book's first half are no better. They are literally ripped from Microsoft's documentation and dumped on the page in an unremarkable matter.

The book improves in it's second half with more concrete examples of the concepts. They are actually interesting reads and very well explained compared to the first half. Unfortunately, here is where the book's biggest problem comes in. The authors have elected to use Jason Zink's Hieroglyph 3 engine as the basis for all of their examples. While I'm certain Mr. Zink's engine is of a high quality, it is a huge mistake. The justification for it's use is so we as readers are not bogged down in minutia when it comes to initializing Direct3D and Win32. In practice, it fails to allow us experience in initializing Direct3D. This is a fairly important component of using the API and it's dismissal is absurd. You will be forced to return to the documentation of the DXSDK in order to find anything of use, unless you want to be locked into the Hieroglyph engine. The biggest problem with authors using their own engines is in the changes that occur over time. Including raw DX and Win32 code allows future use even through subsequent DXSDK changes with a minimal of rewriting. The Hieroglyph engine is already changing from the version when the book was published just a few short months ago. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the books appendix stating that the Boost libraries are required for building the engine. On the engines homepage, this dependency has already been removed. This isn't a big deal for now, but does speak to the rate at which libraries tend to change overtime. It is entirely possible in the future the engine will have changed so much it's usefulness will suffer. Because of the use of the Hieroglpyh engine, all of the examples focus on shader code and leave everything else up to the engine itself. This is not particularly useful when you want to learn how to code in D3D11 from the ground up.

While the authors have presented a few useful chapters, the book fails to deliver consistently. If you are looking for anything other than a few shader code examples of trendy topics, you will have to look elsewhere. I recommend picking up Frank D. Luna's Direct3D 10 book to learn the fundamentals of DX programming. Afterward the Direct3D 11 documentation will be more than sufficient at highlighting the differences in the older and newer APIs. If you want the examples this book offers, I would suggest a GPU pro or ShaderX book as they are considerably heavier on content and will provide many more examples than this book provides. Again, it is not a bad book and if I were looking for strict documentation this would be high on my list. It's weakness however is in striking a balance between documentation like theory and cohesive examples of implementation."

"This book is too difficult for beginners and useless for advance users (you won't really learn something new)."

Wow - I'm sorry to hear that you didn't like it. Can you elaborate on what didn't think was good about it? I thought that the discussion of the pipeline in Chapter 3 would be exactly what a beginner would want - its almost 100 pages that describes precisely what the pipeline does. This is targetted at people that haven't spent lots of time with the API already, so I am surprised that you don't think it is suitable for beginners...

Even so, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I would really like to hear your feedback though - that is the only way to improve in such cases!

I don't have the book but it looks like something I'm going to pick up soon. However - and this is pure speculation from looking at the contents - I'd say it doesn't look good for beginners. Beginner books have chapters like "Introduction to C++" and "Drawing Your First Triangle", organized more like a collection of tutorials. Your book looks like it would be great for experienced programmers starting to use DX11, going through each topic in detail.