Rating: 
Summary: Great introduction to the DX Managed API
Review: This book is great if you wish to get a good introduction to the Managed DirectX API itself. If you have no previous experience of 3D coding, this is not the book for you. To get anything out of this book you sholud have at least basic understanding of 3D math and 3D graphics. Also this book does not teach you how to design a 3D game engine. The examples in the book are basicly useless in a real engine. But they give you a great understanding of the API. And that's what the title is surgesting, isn't it?
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book - Code needs slight tweaking though
Review: This book is one of the best DirectX books out there. Managed DX9 is the newest thing out there, and it will save developers tons of time when coding games and other applications that use DX for rendering. The code requires a few tweaks though b/c of recent changes to the DX api with the October 2004 release. You have to comment out references to Lights.Commit(); because the function was removed in the newest versions of DX 9.0C. Other than that, the code performs flawlessly and the examples are easy to follow.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book lives up to it's title, it's concise and quick. It's definately an easy read. The author did an awesome job on presenting the information with a steady pace and didn't tie you up with nonsense windows C# programming API features unless necassary. There are a few flaws in the source code, but as programmers, and problem solvers the fixes should come natural due to the fact that most are trivial from what i've found.
I'm not a C# guru, but I took his code and from what I knew in C# did all of his projects. From there, ported everything into C++ to see if I could.
This is a great begining book, I wish more authors would follow his style and leave the frothy programming out that serves no purpose except to show how great of a programmer they are. This book gives you a strong base as a beginner for what you need which leads to what you will want. I recommend it highly for the DX9 beginner.
Rating:
Summary: This explains more in less time than all the other DX9 books
Review: This book truely is what it claims to be: A kickstart! It moves fast and may give people who are not familiar with Visual Studio .NET a hard time keeping up. But this is what I really liked about this book! You want to learn how to program? Find a different book! You want to get into DirectX development? Look no further!Just the first chapter explains more than practically any other book about Managed DirectX I have read. Sure, it doesn't have all the long and ellaborate explanations some of the other books have. But for some reason, I still felt like a had a better understanding of how to do things the 'right way' after reading this book. This may have to do with the fact that the author of the book is also the author of the API. The book covers a lot of ground. Most of the chapters deal with Direct3D (which is what I was interested in), although the author does touch on other subjects such as DirectInput. The pace is fast and the author covers the whole range from primitive drawing techniques to using higher level concepts, such as meshes, and eve the HLSL (high level shader language), which many would consider an advanced topic. Well, I do anyway... ;-) The book doesn't just provide shallow introductions. In fact, the author doesn't even shy away from topics such as skeletal anomation of meshes, or writing pixel and vertex shaders to create specular highlights and per-pixel lighting effects. Well done! This book will explain a lot, and it does so quickly. However, if you have no experience with 3d graphics at all, you may want to follow up with another book, such as 'Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DX9' by Frank D. Luna, which will give you a good understanding of related topics, such as a lot of the underlying math used for matrix transformation and vector mechanics. This can be done as a second step though, since this book does not require knowledge of these things, as it uses functions provided by the Managed API for practically everything it does. As we are starting do work more with 3d graphics as a company, I have a need to get team members up to speed on the subject matter. This is the book I recommended they all read...
Rating:
Summary: Far and away the best Managed DirectX book available.
Review: This book was exactly what i was looking for. I was new to graphics programming, and wanted to learn some DirectX. Since my language of choice was C#, so this book was a natural choice for me. It started off with the basics and quickly advanced to the more interesting topics. I can't imagine any Managed DirectX developer not getting benefits from this book. The earlier reviewer complaining about compilation errors is obviously confused about something. Everything in the book has worked flawlessly without a single compile error.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: This is a great book. The author clearly knows a lot about the material, and explains it in a very concise way. I particularly appreciate the way the author expects the reader to do compiles after entering a couple of lines of code, wondering exactly why it doesn't quite work yet, and what needs to be added to actually get the desired result. The whole process is very interactive and iterative, and I found it a lot easier to grasp basic concepts using this book than others, more comprehensive books. That said, if you're new to 3d graphics, you probably want some backup-litterature that explains matrix transforms and simple math. I wouldn't hesitate recommending this book to anyone wanting to get started with Managed DirectX 9. The CD is also great, for the first time (ever?), stuff just works straight out of the box. Open solution and press F5 to run. This is extremely satisfying. The examples on the CD are perfectly sized, so you can easily understand the whole thing in one sitting, with a little help from the book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is an amazing book. It clearly explained how to create polygons, add lighting, etc. It may help to have a basic understanding of 3-d graphics before reading this book. Even understanding another API, like OpenGL, helps. Understanding DX is not necessary to understand this book.
Rating:
Summary: The BEST book on Managed DirectX arounf
Review: TOTALLY Complete and VERY Easy to understand; what else could I say? The book can be understood by starters (with a little effort); and go deep on most of the topics, so even the hardcore graphic programmers will still find a lot of interesting topics. A MUST!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent information for the experienced developer
Review: What I really found refreshing about this book is that it speaks to the experienced developer audience who is looking for information on how to move into game or 3D graphics development. Too many of these "how to program DirectX" books I've read (and I've read quite a few of them) assume the audience is a casual developer who needs to be brushed up on the basics of what it means to write a program.
I found the book's organization to be well done. It starts with simple but interesting examples of creating and manipulating 3D objects but it moves quickly enough that by chapter 6 (out of 20 or so chapters) you're already writing a complete game. With that out of the way, the rest of the book delves into good detail on the power and breadth of the DirectX APIs.
I highly recommend this book for developers who want to learn how quickly and easily they can extend their existing knowledge of how to write .NET applications into the 3D realm.
Rating: 
Summary: I couldn't follow the examples
Review: When readng through this book, the later examples for the Dogder game do not work. There is errata in the book that prevents proper execution. Further, the author skips steps that aren't entirely clear when reading along. When looking at the sample code it is only end-product code, and doesn't help you through the steps in between. I found myself trying to get examples to compile and run more than learning the API.
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