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Title: Sams Teach Yourself DirectX 7 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- Hours) by Robert Dunlop, Dale Shepherd, Mark Martin ISBN: 0-672-31634-X Publisher: Sams Pub. Date: 17 December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.99

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Average Customer Rating: 2.68 (38 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Passable information, horrible editing.
Comment: I'm a professional windows programmer and got this book as a simple quickstart into DirectX which I haven't dealt much with in the past. I haven't read the entire book yet, but I have read the first couple of chapters, and skimmed various others.

o The coding style is awful. The naming convention is a hodge-podge of szHungarianNotation, unix_style_underscores and variations. Formatting is uneven and makes following the printed code rather difficult. Tons of global variables. I'm generally willing to overlook this as I don't copy code verbatim from books anyway, but I'd hate to be using this as a beginner.

o The code is written in a combination of C and C++ styles/APIs. I would have preferred if the author is going to use C++ that he actually made full use of the language, otherwise the code would be much clearer in plain C.

o The more I browse the the book the more obvious it becomes how badly layed out it is. Part IV is labelled "Welcome to 3D" however the first two chapters are on DirectMusic, wouldn't this have gone better in Part III "Adding Music and Sound"? It does contain two chapters on 3D topics, but you don't actually create a 3D application untill the first chapter of Part V "Input Devices", which in fact does not cover input devices, but covers basic 3D, textures, lighting etc... Part VI "Direct3D Immediate Mode" contains chapters on DirectInput and Force Feedback (what happened to Part V ?) as well as 3D Sound (Part III?)

o The first outright error that I noticed was in chapter 4, which states "In the last hour, you used a timer message WM_TIMER, to notify...." which is false. (the code on the CD may have, since I haven't looked at it, but the book did not)

Apart from that, the information presented so far does seem more or less useful and applicable, if not elegant.

To anyone that has some experiance in windows developement, you may be better served browsing through MSDN (which you are certainly familiar with) and it's samples, unless you have money to burn and just want to check this out.

To anyone that has little or no experience and anyone who just prefers to work from a book, this one is likely to frustrate you and teach you quite a few bad programming habits, try and find a better one. "Beginning Direct3D Game Programming" and "Isometric Game Programming With Directx 7.0" look promising and so far have great reviews.

Rating: 2
Summary: ERRORS
Comment: i borrowed this book from a friend, and must note that there are SEVERAL SEVERE errors in Hour 5 (i havent got past it now)

for instance, they modify the bitmap_surface function, yet do not disclose the new one, or how to modify the existing one to handle the RECT they've added... im not a new programmer, and i STILL cant get this working via the book...

Rating: 1
Summary: Last 24hrs book I ever buy, and the last one from SAMS
Comment: I bought this book mainly for it's 3D section, but also to learn about DirectX in general. I had hopes of writing a simple 3D game (maybe even a 2D one), however it quickly became apparent that the Author has probably never used DirectX for that purpose!! I honestly found myself wondering, "Why else would you use DirectX if not for programming games?"

I worked through a few of the lessons (attempting the 24 hour goal), however after the first few lessons, I just couldn't continue. The lessons were so damm boring. I mean - the whole point of DirectX is to bring games to life, if not games, then at least bring the screen to life! This Author killed any spirit I had to create a "laser gun battle while driving to a fight scene in my Hover-Ferrari dodging laser fire from monsters with laser-cannons grafted to their chests!"

Instead we get a [bad] picture of a two dimensional, badly drawn taxi, moving to the left of the screen slowly (but smoothly), while the background moved a little bit and a sound moved from one speaker to the other. I mean really!!!! I have not seen a game like that EVER in my life - except for something designed for toddlers whilst learning to tell the difference between a horsy and a cow! Granted, this particular topic was only a demonstration of some DirectX techniques, but I had to wonder in what kind of game I would use these techniques? It just wasn't interesting at all - completely boring beyond belief!

The most complex example in the book involved several textured buildings, with a single stationary car and a moving helicopter that you got to fly, except fly is the wrong word! It quickly became apparent that the Author doesn't know how to program the DirectX 3D stuff. When the helicopter rotated, the buildings changed shape! I was absolutely dumbfounded!

SAMS put their name to this book, but instead of that being a good thing, it's now a warning label when I go shopping. Obviously SAMS do not require a high standard for their books, or their Authors.