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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Basically weak., 20 May 1998
By A Customer
If you are looking for this book to actually help you jumpstart into the world of Direct3D, you are going to be disappointed.He just starts firing through various API calls without giving the reader the fundamental background necessary to understand the why's of the API calls. One of my favorite examples, from chapter 3 is: "Destination color keying is probably a new concept to many of you. Destination color keying is used to specify a color, or color range, which will either be replaced, during blitting, or covered up, when using overlays, on our destination. When a destination surface has an associated color key, only the pixels matching the specified color key will be changed (during blitting), or covered up (when using overlays)." Of course, in chapter 3, he is just trying to teach you how to initialize the library. What destination color keying has to do with creating a window escapes me. Apparently it escapes Mr Kovachs as well, because he doesn't mention it again. I suppose that if your goal is to cut and paste someone elses code to make a working application, his works (almost) as well as anyone's. Unless you have inhuman patience, you aren't actually going to learn anything from this book. Oh yeah, the install program throws the samples and DirectX SDK into seemingly random locations of your hard disk. Even better, they don't compile, at least not under MSVC++ 4.x.
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