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Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus-Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization
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Author: André LaMothe
List Price: $59.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0672318350
Publisher: SAMS (02 June, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 11,603
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
The best game programming book available
I read few reviews here in which some of the people said that Lamothe's C style of coding sucks and he explains in a lengthy and boring manner. Please...please...please...Haven't you read the back cover of the book ? Lamothe said that by reading this book, a NEWBIE in game programming can write a Quake II kind of engine. That means it is more concentrated on newbies. By Object oriented programming, a beginner may lose interest by feeling the complexity of OOP. Writing in C style will be simple for a newbie to understand.
Lamothe also teaches us concepts in a funny way by which one can feel the nativeness. For all the newbies, this book is a must buy. For all the senior game programmers, who code in OOP can still buy the book for variety of concepts it deals with.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Read this book if you want to learn game programming
I have read many game programming books, and I must say this is simply the best. It is well written and comes with a wealth of solid code samples ranging from small examples to entire games. Andre' begins with the basics of Windows and DirectX programming, then before tackling the more complex topics of 3D rendering he covers the Mathematics required to truly understand game and graphics programming.The sections on 3D math and advanced 3D rendering are what set this book apart from the crowd, by covering more than the normal superficial overview. These sections alone are worth buying the book.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Excellent information, but not concise and not C++
This is an excellent book on writing a complete 3D engine in software from the smallest drawable element, the pixel. It is by far the best book available to teach low level graphics programming, and to learn the concepts behind how libraries such as OpenGL and DirectX actually work. It has it all, from the mathematics to coding techniques to optimization.Unfortunately, the book is not without its faults. Some of the coding is just sloppy. For instance, Lamothe likes to use lots of global variables. Perhaps there is a slight performance increase with these optimizations, but I'm not sure if it's worth the time and effort of debugging code with lots of globals. This is especially true for people just learning the concepts. In my opinion, he should have left the optimization to the end of the book, after all the concepts had been taught. Another problem is the use of C. Lamothe argues that it's easier to teach in C and that C is faster than C++. Honestly, this is 2004, and with Pentium's running in the 3GHz range, I think the speed difference is virtually non-existant. Perhaps there is a greater base of programmers that know C, but with nearly all college Computer Science programs teaching C++ and object oriented programming, the coding style seems a bit dated. Using C++ features could have greatly improved the clarity of the code. The last problem is Lamothe's long-winded writing style. I understand that he's trying to make his book "fun" by including little anticdotes and jokes, but this 1700 page book could have been done in 1000 pages easily. He writes like people talk, and, for a technical book, that's not the best approach. Here's one example, a caption to a screenshot: "You might notice a bit of similarity to the ancient game Tail Gunner. Mike, if you're reading this, did you ever get that Tail Gunner in your living room working?" I wrote one paragraph about why this book is great, and three about why it sucks. That's not really fair; it is a wonderful book for REALLY LEARNING what's going on under the covers in OpenGL or DirectX. I only hope that the second edition comes back a bit neater, more consice, and with support for C++. It's a fantastic value and I highly recommend it.
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