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Rating: 
Summary: ERRORS
Review: i borrowed this book from a friend, and must note that there are SEVERAL SEVERE errors in Hour 5 (i havent got past it now)for instance, they modify the bitmap_surface function, yet do not disclose the new one, or how to modify the existing one to handle the RECT they've added... im not a new programmer, and i STILL cant get this working via the book...
Rating: 
Summary: Last 24hrs book I ever buy, and the last one from SAMS
Review: I bought this book mainly for it's 3D section, but also to learn about DirectX in general. I had hopes of writing a simple 3D game (maybe even a 2D one), however it quickly became apparent that the Author has probably never used DirectX for that purpose!! I honestly found myself wondering, "Why else would you use DirectX if not for programming games?" I worked through a few of the lessons (attempting the 24 hour goal), however after the first few lessons, I just couldn't continue. The lessons were so damm boring. I mean - the whole point of DirectX is to bring games to life, if not games, then at least bring the screen to life! This Author killed any spirit I had to create a "laser gun battle while driving to a fight scene in my Hover-Ferrari dodging laser fire from monsters with laser-cannons grafted to their chests!" Instead we get a [bad] picture of a two dimensional, badly drawn taxi, moving to the left of the screen slowly (but smoothly), while the background moved a little bit and a sound moved from one speaker to the other. I mean really!!!! I have not seen a game like that EVER in my life - except for something designed for toddlers whilst learning to tell the difference between a horsy and a cow! Granted, this particular topic was only a demonstration of some DirectX techniques, but I had to wonder in what kind of game I would use these techniques? It just wasn't interesting at all - completely boring beyond belief! The most complex example in the book involved several textured buildings, with a single stationary car and a moving helicopter that you got to fly, except fly is the wrong word! It quickly became apparent that the Author doesn't know how to program the DirectX 3D stuff. When the helicopter rotated, the buildings changed shape! I was absolutely dumbfounded! SAMS put their name to this book, but instead of that being a good thing, it's now a warning label when I go shopping. Obviously SAMS do not require a high standard for their books, or their Authors.
Rating: 
Summary: Concepts for beginners ... GREAT, Samples and Code ... POOR
Review: I have just started learning DirectX and chose to start with 7.0. I wanted a book to start out with the basics and teach me the concepts. I like to skim the concepts, quickly picking up the topics in order to get an overall picture before moving to an intermediate mode of learning and subsequently fleshing out the details. THIS BOOK DID THAT! From knowing very little about DirectX programming, I picked up the basics extremely fast and understood the ideas and concepts with little effort thanks to the book's concise and informative path through the topics. But it took me forever to program DirectX. The code was obviously left over from a prior version of DirectX. First of all, although the DirectX types were changed in the book ... the sample code on the CD reflected an older version of DirectX. Also the sample code in the book contained some basic mistakes that appear to come from changes in DirectX 7. I learned more about DirectX 7 hunting down the mistakes and fixing the coding problems than I really cared to in a beginner's book. Good or bad, for beginner's I feel this will deter some future programmers because it was a lot of work. But should anyone stick with it, you will be somewhat proficient with DirectX by the time you finish the book and complete all the code. Maybe some people made up thier own code, but being new, I stuck with the examples in the book. Overall I liked the book and it taught me what I wanted to know about DirectX 7. It was just a lot harder wadeing through the code than I thought it should be.
Rating:
Summary: Passable information, horrible editing.
Review: I'm a professional windows programmer and got this book as a simple quickstart into DirectX which I haven't dealt much with in the past. I haven't read the entire book yet, but I have read the first couple of chapters, and skimmed various others. o The coding style is awful. The naming convention is a hodge-podge of szHungarianNotation, unix_style_underscores and variations. Formatting is uneven and makes following the printed code rather difficult. Tons of global variables. I'm generally willing to overlook this as I don't copy code verbatim from books anyway, but I'd hate to be using this as a beginner. o The code is written in a combination of C and C++ styles/APIs. I would have preferred if the author is going to use C++ that he actually made full use of the language, otherwise the code would be much clearer in plain C. o The more I browse the the book the more obvious it becomes how badly layed out it is. Part IV is labelled "Welcome to 3D" however the first two chapters are on DirectMusic, wouldn't this have gone better in Part III "Adding Music and Sound"? It does contain two chapters on 3D topics, but you don't actually create a 3D application untill the first chapter of Part V "Input Devices", which in fact does not cover input devices, but covers basic 3D, textures, lighting etc... Part VI "Direct3D Immediate Mode" contains chapters on DirectInput and Force Feedback (what happened to Part V ?) as well as 3D Sound (Part III?) o The first outright error that I noticed was in chapter 4, which states "In the last hour, you used a timer message WM_TIMER, to notify...." which is false. (the code on the CD may have, since I haven't looked at it, but the book did not) Apart from that, the information presented so far does seem more or less useful and applicable, if not elegant. To anyone that has some experiance in windows developement, you may be better served browsing through MSDN (which you are certainly familiar with) and it's samples, unless you have money to burn and just want to check this out. To anyone that has little or no experience and anyone who just prefers to work from a book, this one is likely to frustrate you and teach you quite a few bad programming habits, try and find a better one. "Beginning Direct3D Game Programming" and "Isometric Game Programming With Directx 7.0" look promising and so far have great reviews.
Rating:
Summary: You've got to be kidding
Review: In 24 hours? Ha! Here's the sequel... "Teach Yourself to Write Diablo 3 in 21 Days"! You will not "Teach Yourself DirectX7" in 24 hours. You will, however, learn that this code dosn't compile without your having PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE of DirectX. The absolute beginner might like this book. However, since the stuff really doesn't work anyway, I can't recommend the book even for them. Stay away from this book. Instead, read the .HLP files and example code in the SDK, which to this date are still the best source of info. Heck, they all but write your first app for you if you bother to look hard enough.
Rating:
Summary: Not so hot
Review: The example code is poorly written, and full of errors. Unless you're quite handy with Visual C++, stay well clear of this one... a good knowledge of this environment is a MUST to get the example code working. All told, the text itself isn't too bad as an introductory text on DirectX, but the book is pretty much useless without the ability to run the examples.
Rating:
Summary: DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK
Review: This book has a lot of negitive reviews, I would like to point out some things. Unlike many of the other "beginner" books on DirectX (take Windows Game Programming for Dummies as an example). This book does make a great effort to attempt to cover all aspects of DirectX, and devotes much of it's text to Direct3D. Nost books only cover select topics, most are broken up to: DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectPlay.. or just Direct3D, this book attempts to do all this in 24 hours. The 24 hour bit can be a bit misunderstood. One can take it to mean a cover to cover read knowing nothing about topic or related topics in 24 hours (and this is very unrealistic) or one can assume the total reading time of the book will be 24 hours, this doesn't account for personal research and experimenting on the topics discussed. The book does only touch on many of it's topics, it could not be part of the "24 hour" book series if it did not, and you can read this book in 24 hours, providing you also add in at least 4 hours of further research (though the DirectX SDK documentation and samples) and personal experimenting for each hour of read time, you CAN walk away learning quite a bit. Learning DirectX takes effort and hard work, if you want a hand-holding book the ..for Dummies book I mention above is fantastic, if you want a good over-view of DirectX 7 that assumes you know what a computer is, what a compiler is, how to program in C++, etc... get this or some other more specialized book on DirectDraw or Direct3D. Only 3 stars because there are some errors in the text and samples and it can be a bit misleading as most readers of the "24 hour" books may be expecting something a lot more stright-forward.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: This book is preatty thin and it emphisizes a lot on directmedia which is quite unnecessary for a thin book. Most is about 2D programming and that is't a lot either. They barely scratched 3D. This book is only for people who wants to look at directX and aren't intending to use it seriously.
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