I loved how the book explained everything. I have used DirectX books before and just done "what in the world..." because of how the information is organized. You have pieces of code and huge, long-winded explanations that complicate things. This book on the other hand explains everything well. Straight to the point and usually only gives you the history lesson when it's needed.



Problem is... the source code. I tried things as the book explained them into the compiler. Some of the functions do not even work. You get a lot of:



// g_pD3DDevice is a pre-initialized 3-D Device Object



which doesn't help much since it was explained only once.



I got lost quite a few times because the book hardly had any complete sets of code. In a lot of books, there'd be code sections with compilable example code (that works) that shows you an application of the code being explained. There isn't much of that in this book. There are code examples on the CD-Rom, but they don't seem to fit the material in the book. I had to supplement the examples from material from Microsoft's MSDN pages.



If you get this book, be prepared to use supplemental material (other book, online, etc). It explains how to do things well, but the source code inside wasn't very conducive to learning for me.