Once again Frank is back with his 4th installment of the "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with..." series and this time it dives into DirectX 11. The accompanying website d3dcoder.net stays the same for this 4th book and there you can find the details of all the books, accompaying code, solutions to selected problems and the forum.
I was actually lucky enough to get a sneak preview of some of the chapters from this book and do some early testing of the source code before it was released. Which for a series that I enjoy so much was a bit of a thrill and Frank even gave me a little mention in the thanks in the book (aww shucks Frank!)
But what do I actually think about the book? Personally I'm a big fan of this series and I own a copy of each of the 4 books. It slots in very nicely with the relaxed but informative style of the other three books and if you've read any of the others in the series you'll instantly recognise it as a "Frank Luna book".
DirectX 11 is again quite a change from its predeccesor so there are some new chapters to reflect it in this book especailly around the areas of the additional pipeline stages (Compute and Tesselation stages) and the new effects requirements. And I think given the complexity of the material associated with these new features frank does a good job of providing an introduction but don't expect to be able to implement top of the world effects with these the book is afterall an introduction.
The other big change is to do with DirectX's move away from using the D3DX utility library, no longer can you take advantage of the math and texture loading functions that we're all use to instead we now have XNAMath (actually changed names again to DirectXMath with the new Windows SDK). It takes a little getting use to but there are some good benefits also.
The book is all about getting your appetite for learning game programming going and the basics are good enough to provide you a platform to go on and extend your knowledge if you want to. The demos aren't ground breaking but again they're a start and the rest is up to you.
You don't need to own all the other books in the series, there is more than enough information to pick up this new book and run with it, however I think straight out of the box a bit more effort has to be put in to get everything set up to compile and run the code. Believe me it's very possible (as I've run all of the samples) but don't just expect to double click on the solution file, click compile and run. I think at the very least you need to have some C++ skills under your belt the rest you can learn from this book.
The d3dcoder forum complements the books perfectly and is fantastic. Lots of programmers there (including me) always chip in with ideas and help and you'll even find Frank there answering questions when he gets a chance. So you should drop in and say hi, even if you don't own the books.
So do yourself a favour if you're looking at getting into game programming for the first time or you're keen to upgrade some previous work into DirectX 11 then this is well worth a look.
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