Rating: 
Summary: Great Concept, Poor Editing
Review: I've gotten about halfway through this book in the past two weeks and I feel like I'm learning enough where I can start writing my own simple games once I'm done with it. I started from knowing VB.net pretty well (for business apps), but not knowing the first thing about DirectX or Game Programming. That said, the editing of the code samples in this book is atrocious. The code samples in the book almost never match those on the CD and you have to figure out "what they mean" most of the time, debugging stuff yourself. Another dumb thing is that whoever wrote the code doesn't know how to use arrays, and always Dims a 4 element array as MyArray(4) instead of (3). Lastly, they don't tell you to enable "key preview" on your forms, so if you didn't know to do that from reading it in another .Net book, the keyboard handler functions would never work for you. Bottom line is that this book can help you learn elementary game programming in VB.net, as long as you know the language reasonably well (decent VB6 would be enough), and you won't get too frustrated trying to reconcile the code in the book and on the CD. It's too bad: If they had gotten their act together, this could have been a 5 star book.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing of 3D
Review: If you want to read something of 3D forget this book.
This book cover 2D programming.
There are a chapter talking about 3D (basic concepts).
Rating: 
Summary: My Xperiment with this book
Review: In the beginning, the title of this book attracted me a lot as a VB.NET programmer aiming to add some 3D content to my programs. The title seemed close enough to my ojective. I thought i could easily learn DirectX 9.0 from this book. Unfortunatly, this didn't happen.First of all this book is missing the sense of attracting the reader to it, it gives examples and it goes through some steps and finally it tells you to copy the rest of the code from the companying CD. Also some examples have mistakes so they may not function well just by wrutung them. I got frustrated because of that, i had to copy and correct a lot using the cd which finally ended up with me by copying the whole project and understanding it on my own. Probably the most usefull chapter is chapter 3, in which the author explains the basics of 3D gaming. However, This book doesn't deal with 3D anymore, most ( in fact 99%) are dealing with 2D games. As an advice, if you are trying to find what i looked for, try another book as I am doing now. This book doesn't worth the money i spent on it. I am sorry to say so, but truth is truth
Rating:
Summary: Too many errata for this to be an effective teaching book
Review: Like a few others who have posted here I was excited to see this book. How disappointed I was to find that the book was a complete mess. I feel for other budding game programmers like me who have struggled looking for the Draw( ) command referred to on pages 36 and 37. I kept searching through the previous pages, sure that I had missed something somewhere. Turns out there is no Draw( ) command, never was. The correct command is Show( ). If I'm not mistaken the problem does not exist on the CD source code (available with the book), but for those who are typing it in from the book line by line (like me), you can stop looking now. The mistake has been caught by APress and that plus other errata can be found here: http://www.apress.com/book/errataDisplay.html?bID=111&sID=1039 I realize now that lots of books have errata pages online, so I guess this is normal in the industry, but it seems obvious to me that nobody at APress actually sat down and tried to USE this book as a layman. I know this because if they had done so prior to going to print, they would have found and fixed this problem! What is also funny is that Mr. Labao and Ms. Hatton also have apparently not used the book they wrote, either. Kinda scary that as computer scientists they published the book while forgetting the most BASIC concept of computer programming of any kind: TEST, TEST, TEST!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Too many errata for this to be an effective teaching book
Review: Like a few others who have posted here I was excited to see this book. How disappointed I was to find that the book was a complete mess. I feel for other budding game programmers like me who have struggled looking for the Draw( ) command referred to on pages 36 and 37. I kept searching through the previous pages, sure that I had missed something somewhere. Turns out there is no Draw( ) command, never was. The correct command is Show( ). If I'm not mistaken the problem does not exist on the CD source code (available with the book), but for those who are typing it in from the book line by line (like me), you can stop looking now. The mistake has been caught by APress and that plus other errata can be found here: http://www.apress.com/book/errataDisplay.html?bID=111&sID=1039 I realize now that lots of books have errata pages online, so I guess this is normal in the industry, but it seems obvious to me that nobody at APress actually sat down and tried to USE this book as a layman. I know this because if they had done so prior to going to print, they would have found and fixed this problem! What is also funny is that Mr. Labao and Ms. Hatton also have apparently not used the book they wrote, either. Kinda scary that as computer scientists they published the book while forgetting the most BASIC concept of computer programming of any kind: TEST, TEST, TEST!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Good, but basic introduction
Review: This is a pretty good book. It is very easy to read although the subjects discussed aren't really trivial. The book touches on a wide array of topics, ranging from GDI+ to DirectInput and DirectAudio, as well as DirectDraw. However, the potential buyer should be aware that this is a very basic book. If you want to write the next Doom, this book will not teach you how to do that. In fact, considering that this book has "DirectX" in the title, it covers very little 3D programming. However, this book DOES teach the basics of game development and almost all aspects that go along with that, from simple graphics to controlling sound, and controllers such as force feedback joysticks. But as I said: Most of it is pretty basic. But if you have no experience with game development whatsoever, reading this book will be an excellent first step...
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: To sum it up in a single word: simple. This book is far too simple to provide any real useful information. Don't waste your time on this one.
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