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Summary: Best DirectX Book
Review: I love it. Mr. Sink's writing style is easy to read and makes complex topics easier to understand. I am recommending this to all my friends.
Rating:
Summary: Love it, love it, love it.
Review: I met Keith at the last DirectX Meltdown conference, therefore I had to try this book. In my opinion he did a fantastic job on it. From talking to him, I know he faced an uphill battle getting it published, so I know it wasn't easy. I'm happy to finally see it in print.
The content is excellent for a reference manual as well as a tutorial on all aspects of DirectX programming for VB developers. I'm happy that VB developers now have a good source book for their game development efforts.
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Summary: Bringing it together
Review: I thought this title brought added value. In addition to showing inconsistancies with the MS documents, discussions regarding the hows and whys were extremely beneficial. There are a few nuggets regarding distribution that I have not found anywhere else. Also, marketing items/considerations are included. I found this books code worked without any massaging, unlike the DXSDK help file samples. This book is a solid reference.
BTW: DirectX 8.x is NOT completely compatable with .NET we will have to wait for DX9. Some .NET content was added in the margin as well as in the appendix.
Rating: 
Summary: Do not buy this book
Review: I was looking in the directX help file and noticed that the lessons in this book are copied from the SDK's help file with the names of the variables changed. Imagine how mad I am to realize I just paid $50 for samples I already had. Isn't this against the law?
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Summary: Great for Multimedia Developers
Review: I've been looking for a book that talks about DirectX for the masses for awhile. I've known for awhile that this program could be used for more than games, and this book expands on that thought. I'm glad to see an easy to understand book on VB and DirectX multimedia programming. This is a must for both gamers and non gamers wanting to make cool graphics, sound, and other mutlimedia products in VB.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Half Bad
Review: Im about halfway throught the book (just finish the section of the book on graphics programming with directX8). I think the book's weakest point was its lack of example code on a CD (although their was some downloadable code on the book's site that wasn't hard to find). One "complete" project with all the skills the book taught would have been helpful. The book progressed in a logical order and was easy to follow and interesting to read. The code in the text was somewhat repetitive and would have been easier to put it once and have more examples on CD/available for download. Overall though, it isn't half bad and is good introduction to DirectX.
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Summary: Not Very Good!
Review: Just got this book and am disappointed with it. The book is ok if you don't want to read the SDK docs. You would be better off with the book by Crooks which includes some samples, etc.
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Summary: Essential reading for the VB6->.NET programmer.
Review: Keith Sink, DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development (Sams, 2002)It's 2003, now, and the world is slowly migrating to Microsoft's .NET standard (well, those who aren't using Linux, anyway). Here's a prediction, built on past observation of the process: companies who have been developing apps in Visual Basic for years will get copies of VB.NET, expecting a no-brainer transition from one to the other. Their programmers will import the programs, and immediately die of massive aneurysms at seeing the number of errors (especially the number of seemingly unfixable errors, if you happen to be programming in DirectX or any other API where classes expose other modules, which is verboten in .NET's "managed code" environment). This will leave the companies stranded and unwilling to move to .NET. They will be stuck behind those companies whose programmers have read DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development. Keith Sink's book was written at the perfect time, and he often goes step by step through processes both writing code for VB6 and for VB.NET, making the book an invaluable resource for .NET VB programmers who are converting VB6 programs (or who are programming in an area where there are far more VB6 books than .NET books, which is, well, just about every area you can think of). Even if you're not planning on using DirectX, seeing the way things transition from one language to the other in one aspect of the language should give you a clue on how to make the transitions in other areas. Sink doesn't mention at any point that there's actually a Microsoft.DirectX library in .NET. But then, neither does Microsoft's documentation. Nor does its upgrade wizard. (I only found about it after asking a random question on a message board.) So it's hard to fault Sink for something that, at the time he was writing, may have not been in the framework, or may have been considered an unsolvable problem. That aside, Sink's book is, for the reasons mentioned above, the best I've read to date about Visual Basic .NET at all. For such a specialized book to be so generally useful puts it in a class by itself. ****
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Summary: Finally DirectX for VB coders
Review: Right On! Now I can build better multimedia apps in VB. This book is easy to read and the examples are very helpful. Finally I can do multimedia programming without using C++. This is exactly the kind of reference I wanted to create multimedia apps.
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Summary: Good Programming Books Are Hard To Find
Review: Sadly, this isn't one of them :/ The author must have read the SDK doc's, re-worded it a little, then wrote a book out of it. Its worthless as a cookbook as there is no code examples and its worthless for learning as it doesn't explain "Why". I learned a lot more by looking at the SDK doc's then I did with this book. In fact I haven't learned nothing at all from it.
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