PC Underground: Unconventional Programming Topics

Rating:
Summary: Pc Underground - The ultimate demo programming handbook
Review: Pc Underground is a very intense programming tutor dealing with many special effects seen in "demos" or cutting edge computer games. The information is given in such a manner that your preferred programming language does not matter. This book also contains essential sound card information not published by other sources on making "module" players that support SB and GUS cards. Simply put, if you are at all interested in game programming or demos, this is a must have!

Rating:
Summary: Weak Demo Coding Book
Review: Well its the only book I've ever seen on demo coding. It may have been valid around 4 years ago but things have changed since then. The first mistake of this book is using pascal for a majority of the source code. Pascal was used only as a shell for Assembly, and treated like a high-level assembly language. But has very little use today. The second mistake is the graphical content of the book is very weak. It doesn't explain nor supply source code for any decent effect; and nothing new to speek of, even considering when the book was released. The 3d engine is useless. The only strong point is it has lengthy descriptions to several MOD based music file formats, and a decent explanation on how to code a mod player.

Rating:
Summary: Old
Review: When I first started reading this book, I thought it was really great, because it told me how to do things I had never heard of before. But after some time, when I got further in programming, I discovered that most of the information in it is rather useless nowadays. Also, there are (in my Dutch copy of the book) many, many spelling mistakes, and errors in the layout, too. (Tables missing, empty pages where there should have been sourcecode). Overall, this is not a bad book, it's just outdated, and alot of the information just isn't correct.