Rating: 
Summary: You need to enjoy digging through a lot of code...
Review: Not an easy book to learn from, all the code from the first demo program on up use the (complicated) final engine to do their rendering, and you'll have to go spelunking through it to try and figure out what's going on. The emphasis of this book is on the whole game engine itself and you're locked into his way of doing it, you're never given smaller programs that teach you how to do specific topics, it's all or nothing.
The first third of the book barely touches on terrain, you'll get overviews of things like memory management, resource pools, High Level Shader Language, render queue's, and a dozen other topics. And if you already have your own systems for these things or don't like his systems, too bad, because they are interwoven in the code throughout the rest of the book and it's difficult to seperate it out.Like the review above, I have to agree that the terrain looks a bit aged for such a new book, and it runs slow on my P4 2.4ghz with GeForceFX card. I've seen plenty of recent games that look much better and run smooth as silk on my setup. You'll need a very high end system for his techniques to run smoothly on. It's hard to recommend this book when you'll find much better tutorial code on the internet that's more to the point and has better looking results than you will get in this book. It does bring many techniques all together, but not in an easily learnable format when it comes to actually programming it.
Rating: 
Summary: so-so book
Review: The author did a good job of explaining the algorithms. Publisher should've paid for someone to read the book once before printing it. There were tons of spelling errors. This book isn't for people new to DirectX. It was worth $30.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book from an experienced programmer.
Review: The book is exactly how the title describes it. It is developing a 3d terrain engine and if that is what you are looking to do then this is well worth the 30 bucks, in my opinion. The author is an experienced programmer and it shows through the code. The design of the engine is elegant and if you learn nothing else from the book you will at least walk away with a better understanding of engine design. The book not only shows you the theory behind terrain programming but also resource management, scene management and integrating pixel and vertex shaders. This book seems to always be laying around open on my desk.
Rating:
Summary: This is Some Bad Looking Terrain
Review: The picture on the cover of this book seems to be a screenshot of the culminating demo from the final chapter. That's the type of world you can expect to build with the code presented. It isn't pretty, it isn't efficient. My home computer is a slightly long in the tooth 1.2GHz machine with a Geforce 3. The final sample runs at about 10fps and shows really noticable draw in, all while managing to look really really bad. The actual content of the book is passable, but there really isn't anything in here you can't find done better on-line. Most of the ideas presented are sound, though none revolutionary. I just really have to take everything presented with a grain of salt seeing how poor the end product is. You could read the section on animating water, but then look at the water in the demo. Texture blending is covered, but the texturing in the demo is horrible. The terrain is randomly generated, the methods are described in the book, and once again the final result really fails to impress with overly bumpy, not in the least realistic feeling terrain. The bottom line is that the author of this book produced the demos in this book using the methods presented. If the included demos are the best the author could do, you don't want to be using any of it as the basis for your work.
Rating: 
Summary: waste of money
Review: this book doesn't give you any background or theory on how to create a terrain engine. insted it only shows you code, code and more code!
The little theory presented here seems to be the one in DirectX SDK documentation and it only uses of D3DX functions... Well... don't buy it!
Rating:
Summary: Great (Only if you have the hardware to support it)
Review: This book has a lot of great info in it which is really helping me to get a good grasp of terrain ideas for one of my projects. The only downside is that you need a pretty high end graphics card to run any of the demo code. Once I updated my video card things worked fine, so be warned. Other than that this is right on the money...
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This is a really good book, one of the best i have ever get, a really nice and easy engine with a great and encapsulated code. A neat use of pixel and vertex shaders wich is one of the evaded threads in another books, besides, this book is for DirectX (thank God)
Rating:
Summary: Interesting ideas, many faults.
Review: This is a tough book to recommend. If you need your hand held through detailed examples, this is not a good source at all, especially since the sample programs are (1) overly complex and platform-dependent and (2) slow and ugly. On the other hand, this DOES discuss texturing, quadtrees, a few CLOD algorithms, sky and water rendering, Perlin noise, and a few other things as they relate to terrain, and can be a useful source of ideas for the not-quite-novice. Yes, most of the information here can be found on the web, but that's true of practically any programming book. By the way, a MAJOR annoyance here is the really rather astounding number of typos and basic usage errors ("discreet" vs. "discrete," etc) that somehow were not caught in editing. There seems be a trend to this effect in game programming books lately, but this one is really exceptionally error-ridden.
Rating:
Summary: Talented Programmer, Poor Book Approach
Review: While I do not doubt that Gregory Snook is a very talented programmer, the code shown in this book and on the accompanying CD are proof enough, I believe that this book is of no use to anyone except for the most experienced professionals who have weeks of time to burn learning about Terrain Engines. I am not the most experienced programmer, having only worked with C++ and DX for 4 years now, but the problem with this book is not in complex concepts, but in content. All of the fundamentals of creating and rendering terrain are covered, but the example code and the engine (Gaia) on the CD are overly complex for any sort of educational book. Possibly every single library that Snook referenced has special wrapper functions and classes around them, making an examination of any code snippet next to useless unless the reader has spent days going through dozens of wrapper classes learning all of Snook's syntax. While I do enjoy owning this book as a conceptual reference, I am afraid that it is next to useless as an aid in practical programming scenarios.
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