I loved how the book explained everything. I have used DirectX books before and just done "what in the world..." because of how the information is organized. You have pieces of code and huge, long-winded explanations that complicate things. This book on the other hand explains everything well. Straight to the point and usually only gives you the history lesson when it's needed.

Problem is... the source code. I tried things as the book explained them into the compiler. Some of the functions do not even work. You get a lot of:

// g_pD3DDevice is a pre-initialized 3-D Device Object

which doesn't help much since it was explained only once.

I got lost quite a few times because the book hardly had any complete sets of code. In a lot of books, there'd be code sections with compilable example code (that works) that shows you an application of the code being explained. There isn't much of that in this book. There are code examples on the CD-Rom, but they don't seem to fit the material in the book. I had to supplement the examples from material from Microsoft's MSDN pages.

If you get this book, be prepared to use supplemental material (other book, online, etc). It explains how to do things well, but the source code inside wasn't very conducive to learning for me.

This book is alright, i bought this book some time ago, but one thing is this. ITS NOT FOR NOOB. you need to know a good amount of C or C++. if not then this is not for you. now that i go back to it, its not so bad BUT!!! code is sloppy and not really that great, i suggest buying something else if you are a noob.

I had a specific objective in mind when I bought this book. I'm in the process of writing a hobby level multi-user RPG for me and maybe up to a hundred or so other players (not many hundreds or thousands). I have a solid background in C++, less so in DirectX.

I've bought many books on game programing to help me with this process and to my surprise I've found this one simply amazing while most of the others I've found to be little more than expensive doorstops. :)

Like all the books of this nature, I read it in very much a "pick and choose" manner, focussing on chapters I liked and extracted code from the CD for places where it helped me. I found the material covered and, more importantly, the code representation of that material to be extremely helpful in my coding process.

I believe the tips and code the book provides (which all compile and provide very reasonable and practical applications for the ideas demonstrated) saved me (literally) hundreds of hours of research (not to mention trial and error) finding methods that work and work well and covered all of the core componenets I would want in a role-playing game. It covered multi-player over the internet, 2d and 3d rendering in directX, how to construct combat, spells, chat, and inventory systems and a variety of other items.

Naturally, I had to do a lot of customization to make the game do what I wanted it to do and I had to merge several of the ideas discussed into my own framework (for example the multi player network section is covered more or less stand alone where clearly other parts of the book need to be integrated with it to form a real game), but the result is I have a basic game up and running in a fraction of the time it would have otherwise taken, which no other book has ever really brought me.

It amazes me that people post reviews stating, "Don't buy this book," or "3 stars (but should be less in my opinion)," among many others, because the book doesn't have the quote un-quote "advanced" information they were looking for. According to one reviewer this "advanced" information he was looking for was "a non-Final Fantasy type combat system." This book TEACHES you the IDEAS behind how game programming works, with an emphasis and examples on ROLE PLAYING GAMES. What's the most popular type of role playing game? Final Fantasy type. If you are an "advanced" game programmer and this book didn't help you, then you should be able to use your own knowledge and program your OWN combat system. It seems like you were looking for a book that offered the solution (combat system) that you wanted to cut and paste into your "advanced and superior code." For those that want a book to help their imagination grow and problem solving nodes start firing away after seeing some real-life examples, this book is for you. If you want to buy a book that contains code you are just going to cut and paste into your own source, then you're right, this book is not "advanced" enough.

Prima Press has the merit of being the first company to heavily invest only in publications of game-programming books.. I find that game-programming is one of the most fascinating and well, fun
area of programming and CS in general.. so any effort in this direction is welcome to me.. but I have seen too many titles from this publisher who were too superficial to do any good, or just plain rubbish. This title stands out for the professionality and competence of the author and for the level of detail and completeness of presentation. If you are a programmer with decent C/C++ skills, a curiosity about how games like Diablo work, and a LOT of patience and enthusiasm for game programming by all means get this book. It won't enable you to write the next episode of Diablo or Dungeon Siege but still if you work your way through it studying carefully the text and especially the code presented, in the end you will know enough to create a small
2D/3D adventure game on the diablo style.

Beware this book is thick and dense, and will take time to absorb but you cannot help it if you want to learn something interesting and enjoyable about game programming.
The second edition is coming out, probably updated to the latest
release of DirectX, so watch out for it!