In advance, I apologize for this. I'm sure it's a question submitted and answered countless times and I'm most likely overlooking something, or not finding a thread that has already been through this.. Anyways, I've been learning C++ for a while now, most likely half a year or so at that and I feel as if I have a good grasp on the language. Well somewhat good! I understand things presented to me when it comes to coding.

Now one thing that I'm slightly dumbfounded on is moving out of things like text-based games, or simply programming on the console as I make random things. I've been somewhat studying the Win32 API, which I still cannot find a decent book for. (If any could be suggested, or even sites with good tutorials, I'd appreciate that.) But that aside, the problem I seem to be running into is starting out with rendering graphics and going through that.

I'm aware of SFML, SDL, OpenGL and DirectX. All of which are good in their own rights, but the issue is more or less wanting to learn more about the last two. I've been through DirectXTutorial.com (Or whatever that site is, apologies if I forgot the name.), and what they push seem to sometimes run into errors, or do not push enough for me to learn much before wanting a Premium Sub. I have no issues with a sub fee, or buying books.. Just the site doesn't do enough for me to consider it.

Anyways! To sum this up in a better way, I'm looking for good resources to start out with DirectX or OpenGL. (Websites or books.) The latter of the two for me has been a giant pain. Each time I think I'm stumbled upon something good for OpenGL, it's really outdated. So anything up to date would be wonderful. As for DirectX, I'm looking to learn something from 9/10/11. Mainly 9, seeing as this PC is old and gives me issues as is.

In turn, thank you for reading this and everything!

One difficulty is the level you are jumping in at.

Learning rendering at the primitive level is often good for beginners. Learn what it means to render a few polygons, learn how winding order works, learn how basic texturing works, and so on.

Unfortunately for beginners, newer interfaces like the latest rounds of Direct3D are focused on the high performance algorithms on a particular age of video card. D3D11 is great if you want to have six levels of shaders and a bazillion instances of models. But primitives are not high performance, I don't think there is an equivalent of DrawPrimative in the past few editions of D3D.

Even though the out-of-date resources you found are a few years old and won't teach you about the latest rounds of shaders or the cutting-edge graphics techniques, they will teach you how the graphics system works. The older resources tended to focus on the fundamentals because that's all there was. The old resources will teach you how to use a transformation matrix, how to manipulate objects in space, how to traverse a scene graph, and all the other topics you need to know.

You mentioned SDL and that is a pretty good choice for those just entering graphics. The library does much of the gruntwork for creating windows and managing resources, and it exposes most of the rendering system to you for your own use. You are still responsible for actually making the graphics, and you have access to primitives as well as advanced features.

After you've got the fundamental basics down, then get in to the D3D13 (or whatever we are on at the time) and it's 14 layers of programmable shaders. :-)

Thank you, frob.

Everything you said does have a valid point to it. In ways, I guess I am jumping ahead of myself to get into DirectX and play with all the shaders, etc. Which isn't the best step in all this.

Anyways, I'll toy with SDL for a while and see where I can get. It'll be good just to get some experience in all of this!

Once you're ready to get into DirectX, I would recommend Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0C A Shader Approach as a book to read/reference material. It goes from mathematical foundations to shaders and all the way to shadow mapping. It even includes a (short) section about Win32 API programming as it relates to game programming.