Rating: 
Summary: highly recommended
Review: I posted a review earlier that was based on my initial expetactions of what this book should have been. It was unfair. In fact, using this book as a guide, I have been able to actually get a halfway decent 3d game engine together in a relatively short time. Note that I said that I used it as a guide. This book does not hold your hand, but rather helps the programmer to push forward using the material provided. It is an excellent resource. It is for intermediate to advanced programmers (says so right on the back cover) and gives you some excellent suggestions for building and optimizing your 3d world. The DX tutorials are brief yet complete and give you what you need to get going. The mathematics and physics sections are certainly top-notch. When I see how far I have come, thanks to John's material, I am truly amazed. Sure it is difficult and sometimes frustrating to build a 3d game world, but that challenge is what makes it exciting and satisfying when we succeed. This book will help you do it. It won't do the work for you, and for that I am glad. If you are an experienced programmer and want to tackle this complex challenge, this book is the perfect tool to help you get there. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is being returned
Review: I purchased this book, because of the lack of decent game programming material that's been coming out lately. I was able to read the entire book (minus the DirectX reference) in about 30 minutes. This book is assuming that you already have a Direct3D application running that for some reason, you haven't figured out how to texture map or light. With the amount of knowledge and experience that this book is assuming, there is no point to reading it. Save you money and find better information online.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: I unfortunately had already ordered this book by the time I saw the first review.The book is actually worse IMO than the SDK docs (and thanks for including 500 pages of docs that come FREE in the DXSDK!). There are several errors in the book as well. Here are just a few: p.91 "vertex normal" in table says it is TANGENT to surface at vertex. p.92 "The Geometry Pipeline" diagram: the view xform is missing. p.111 Fig.6.1 diagram of view matrix params shows "right" vector pointing left p.131 EndScene() is shon as a static fn. call, whereas BeginScene() is a normal member call. Most of the 3D diagrams were completely useless--they looked like a beginner user of MSWORD drew them up. --- This book could have been much better. It could have left out the reference pages, explained D3DUtil, etc. The CD I got was even corrupted! One of the .cpp files was garbage.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time/Money
Review: I was expecting working examples. As a video game developer I was sorely disappointed. I wish I could have seen the example code BEFORE I opened the CD. I with I could get my money back.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed reader
Review: I was quite shocked that a book which claims to cover 3D games progamming would devote so few pages to the actual subject. The majority of this book is a reference section devoted to documenting the DirectX API which is all ready done in great detail within the DirectX API which is supplied on the accompanying CD My recommendations is to download or buy the DirectX API and forget this book
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I was really looking forward to this book being released. I thought it would be a great follow up to Johns previous book Cutting Edge 3D Game Programming. But I was wrong. The book is the Microsoft DirectX 7.0 SDK documentation, with 8-10 files thrown in with no examples of using them. Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: falls short of expectations
Review: If you are just starting out in 3d programming and want to know how its done, this book tells you how. but if you want to know how to do it, this book will only confuse you and get you stuck. Knowing an average amount of c++, but not being an expert, i expected this book to walk me through everything. when i got stuck, i tucked it away awhile and taught myself more c++. i now returned to look at this book and realize it is full of flaws. first, i have no idea where this WINDOWCLASS comes from. a review somewhere on here says that its really called something else. i think its supposed to be CWIN or something. the other problem with it is that the book doesnt say where to get it from. you have to search the web to find the include files you need to even start, only to find out that the way the book says to utilize it is wrong in some instances. on the flip side, this book does explain well how its all done. after reading up to the actual implementation, i completely understood the trick to make 3d into a 2d display. before i read the book, i couldnt even imagine how it would be done.
Rating:
Summary: Good DirectX 7.0 Ref
Review: If your looking for a good DirectX 7.0 reference then this book is for you, otherwise pass. If you're looking for a good book to get started doing 3D game programming then get Mr. De Goes 'Cutting-Edge 3D Game Programming with C++'.
Rating:
Summary: Pointless
Review: In case people think that all the negative reviews below are from confused novices: I have been programming games for a living for over ten years, and find this book mostly useless. As other people have noted, about 60% of it is DirectX reference materials. Nice, but not what this book is supposed to be about. Besides, you can download most of them for free from Microsoft. The coverage of Direct3D Immediate Mode is spotty. The author will go into some areas (texture mapping) in depth, and then blow off even more important areas (use of the DrawPrimitive() functions) with only a few superficial paragraphs. Even more frustrating, since there is no example code, you can't look at sample source to fill in the blanks in the text. Even an experienced 2D game programmer like myself is likely to come away from this with no better idea of how to write a D3D Immediate Mode program than they had coming in. In some ways, the portions of the book dealing with Direct3D seem more concerned with generic 3D issues than with what can be done with D3D. While some of this information can be useful, there are other generic 3D books (such as Lamothe's "Black Art of 3D Game Programming") that do the same in far more depth. Unfortunately, there really are no good D3D Immedate Mode books out to recommend (maybe when Lamothe FINALLY gets around to volume 2 of "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus"...). However, one recommendation I can give is to save yourself $40 and a lot of aggravation by avoiding this title.
Rating:
Summary: SUCKS!
Review: It is very brief(like 1 chapter) on Direct 3D.. The rest of the book looks like the Direct X SDK. NOT WORTH IT!
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