The resources stuff is included with pretty much any programming book, they all stop to cover some of the basics like GDI before moving on. Anyway, resources can be cool, and pretty damm usefull.

If your making a windowed app that has ANY options then you might want to place them into a drop down menu, and even if it''s a fullscreen app who doesn''t like drawing custom gfx''s for the exe icon? You don''t need to know this but it''s nice.

The book is current right up to DX7 and is still as valid with DX8 as it''s backwards compatible with the old DirectDraw interface. So everyhting in the book is still valid and i don''t think many people will abandon DirectDraw for 2d stuff for a while yet. If you use D3d in DX8 to do 2D stuff the code can be faster (a lot faster in my case) but it''s also more complex and requires anyone running your program to have more up to date hardware.

All in all i''d stick with direct draw unless your planning on developing in 3d in the near future.

zipless

/* Ignorance is bliss, then you go and spoil it by learning stuff */