Rating: 
Summary: Looks like we have a winner here...
Review: I've been reading through this book for the past few days now and have been pleasantly and repeatedly surprised at the quality and meaningfulness of the writing. Before getting into the style, let's go through what the book covers:Part 1: Basics
Chapter 1 - Intro to Windows Programming
Chapter 2 - Win32 API Programming
Chapter 3 - DirectX
Chapter 4 - 3D Math
Chapter 5 - 3D Concepts
Chapter 6 - Intro to DirectGraphics
Chapter 7 - Lighting
Chapter 8 - Basic Texturing
Chapter 9 - Adv. Texturing
Chapter 10 - Vertex and Pixel Shaders Part 2: 2D Effects
Chapter 11 - Fire
Chapter 12 - 2D Water
Chapter 13 - Image Feedback
Chapter 14 - Image Warping
Chapter 15 - Clouds
Chapter 16 - Blurs and Image Manip.
Chapter 17 - Fades, Wipes, Transitions... Part 3: 3D Effects
Chapter 18 - Particle Systems: Rain, Smoke, Magic, etc
Chapter 19 - Adv. Particle Systems
Chapter 20 - Explosions
Chapter 21 - Guns and Projectiles
Chapter 22 - Lens Flares
Chapter 23 - 3D Water Chapter 24 - Vertex and Pixel Shader Effects The chapter listing doesn't do the topics justice, though. For example the Chapter on Explosions takes you through sprite animation, billboarding, explosion clusters, particles sytem code, shockwaves and then finishes out with a quick few pages on adding a skybox. The breadth and scope of this book is ambitious - and well met - to say the least. The writing style? In short, you're treated like an intelligent person. McCuskey doesn't delve deeply into a lot of the topics or spend pages on end listing function parameters. Instead you get a box off to the side telling you where in the DirectX documentation to find more information or other sources (books, mags, websites) if you want or need to explore a topic more fully. Likewise, you're not going to find page after page of code listing, just the relevant part at the relevant time. Now that I think of it, the book spends very little real estate on code listings. And it flows much better for it. The benefit from a book like this isn't being told how to program a special effect. The benefit, of course, is finding out how it's done in the first place so you don't spend weeks going down the wrong paths. The solutions seem solid and elegant to me but it'll be interesting to see if anyone finds fault with them. There's not much else to say. It's a well executed book and I haven't found any fault with it. I acknowledge first reviews like these are generally regarded cynically, but I'm sure others will back me up once they receive their copy. Well done, Mason.
Rating:
Summary: This book made me want to write my FIRST review!
Review: I've really just started reading this book, but I wanted to write a quick review so as to let others know what they're missing out. The quality and layout of the writing is the best I've seen, especially for beginners I'd probably actually recommend this book over LaMothe's own books. Its better explained and more informitive (as well as being fast and enjoyable). Such as instead of saying "just set it to NULL you don't have to know what it does", McCuskey actually explains what "its" for and why you don't need it (I always liked to know, instead of being left clueless) Its about 900pages of pure content, with little code to break your train of thought (its on the CD). And so far not one sentence is wasted, unlike LaMothe and his comments on what $100K car he drives or how he's some programming "god" by winning a college bet against his peers (what a braggart). It deals with the latest version of DirectX and nVidia SDK. Its very exhaustive on many (if not all) aspects of special effects that you can think of creating. And an unexpected plus to me, was the section on incorporating an intro AVI movie into your game. Don't just listen to me, hurry up and get this book to find out yourself!...
btw...am I the only one whose annoyed at that picture of LaMothe on the back cover of all the GD books, where does he think he's in the 'Matrix'?...he seems to take all the credit from rightfully deserving authors, and thats just wrong in my opinion. Though I'm glad he started this series of books.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much fat and not enough detail
Review: Not enough detail on things that need more explanation and too much on concepts that will be familiar to most readers, such as basic 3D Math. There seems to be a definite lack of focus -- readers who need a primer on 3D concepts are not likely to be the ones reading about pixel shaders, so why have both and not do justice to either? Things like environment mapping and vertex shaders should have been covered in much greater detail and with more annotated code in the book. There are a couple of skimpy equations for cubic and spherical environment mapping and not much else. The book mentions bump mapping at one point but not how to implement it. It's almost as if the original version of the book was too long so they removed parts at random.
Finally, any book which does not respect the readers' intelligence is a bad book in my opinion - this book is littered with statements like "Don't worry about the math, do this and this and you'll get this result." He says this even in the chapter on vertex and pixel shaders when understanding the math behind the fixed-function T&L pipeline is absolutely essential to writing your own shaders! I had reasonably high expectations of this book but it seems suitable only for people who want to make minor tweaks to the sample code and pass it off as their own program. Poor.
Rating: 
Summary: Good idea, terrible result
Review: Terrible book overall. If you ar a begginer, then run away because samples that do not even compile. If you an average then you should also skeep it because when you find code that compiles, it will not run (GPFs and such). If you an advanced programmer, then you would be upset that most of the book seems to be dealing with too basic of the stuff. As an example I tried to build water example. I spend half an hour first configuring project, so that it would compile, then running it under BounceChecker to discover where it GPFs, and finally getting it to run, just to see some garbage. If I find it on some going out of bussiness sale for 5$ I might buy it (it has some interesting concepts for water and fire), but never for a higher price.
Rating:
Summary: A book of the MUST HAVE section
Review: That's amazing. Cool effects that can blow up your computer, and programmed by you! I really like it.
Rating:
Summary: My new favorite book, move over tricks!
Review: This book covers an amazing amount of material with a fun, down-to-earth writing style. I mostly referenced this book for specific effects as I needed them, each chapter is kind of like a stand alone tutorial, very easy to follow and actually implement in your own code. You can make a 3d game with this, I did.
Rating: 
Summary: GOOD BOOK!
Review: This book is halfway decent. It reminds me a lot of back in the day programming little tricks in dos to make cool effects on the screen. Actually, it reminds me a lot of my high school computer science class when I already knew the language, so the teacher let me sit and make a graphics demo to teach the graphics portion of the class. I made a whole ton of demos of neat little tricks that were simple to do but had a good effect. That is what this book is like. You get a few neat tricks, but the problem I have with this is the same as all the others: too much beginner garbage. On top of that, the content does not allow you as much room for expansion beyond what it gives you. Bottom line: It's a buy next to many of the other books out there. But it's still not near the top dog, Programming Role-Playing games with DIrectX by Jim Adams is the best one.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad...........
Review: This book is halfway decent. It reminds me a lot of back in the day programming little tricks in dos to make cool effects on the screen. Actually, it reminds me a lot of my high school computer science class when I already knew the language, so the teacher let me sit and make a graphics demo to teach the graphics portion of the class. I made a whole ton of demos of neat little tricks that were simple to do but had a good effect. That is what this book is like. You get a few neat tricks, but the problem I have with this is the same as all the others: too much beginner garbage. On top of that, the content does not allow you as much room for expansion beyond what it gives you. Bottom line: It's a buy next to many of the other books out there. But it's still not near the top dog, Programming Role-Playing games with DIrectX by Jim Adams is the best one.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible DirectX Coverage
Review: This book makes understanding the complex world of modern computer graphics and the DirectX library as simple as they can be. This title will be an invaluable resource for anyone with a C programming background (or beyond) who wants to become intimitely familiar with the DirectX library for rendering computer graphics. It's heavily slanted towards Windows game programming but the concepts carry over to other domains as well. The book spends time giving background on some of the more useful C++ language features, including stl, utilized in most modern computer games. It also provides an overview of the entire DirectX toolkit: DirectPlay, DirectSound, etc... There's a crash course on the fundamentals of vector/matrix math and basic 3D graphics concepts that are required for a software engineer to really use Direct3D effectively. An experienced C++ graphics programmer can skip over all this and dive right into the advanced graphics features of transform & lighting, pixel and vertex shaders, texture blending effects, etc... The great thing about this title is the way it spends time on motivations and examples so the concepts don't get lost due to their complexity. Simply put if you're a Windows graphics programmer using (or interested in using) DirectX, this book is more than worth its cost!
Rating:
Summary: Great book.
Review: This is the best book for learning the basics of DX AND it is great in its topic: Special Effects. It is 2 books on 1. The main part of the books explain many special effects like 3d water, particle systems, fades, cartoon shaders using vertex shaders... Here is a link to the book's table of contents: Finishing: Great book for the beginner to DX and to the intermediate DX programmer to wants to learn about many cool special effects. This book is not that "newbie only" as the others in the "Game Development Series". PS:Click at the link...
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