Which book should I choose ?

The Partridge Family were neither partridges nor a family. Discuss.
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BurakCanik
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Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Which book should I choose ?

Post by BurakCanik » October 15th, 2014, 12:59 am

I'm currently reading "Introduction to 3d Game Programming with DirectX11" by Frank D. Luna. It's a great book and covers lot's of things. Everything's cool and all. But there is another book, "Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11" by Jason Zink, Matt Pettineo and Jack Hoxley. If I'm not wrong these cool people also hang on GameDev forums and help noobs like me about all kinds of topics. Also they might be working in Microsoft, on directX. I'm not sure about that. Anyways their book has mixed but generally good reviews as it's a little harder and lacks concrete examples. But covers the api on a more "low-level" approach and for example it devotes 100 pages to DirectCompute and 200 pages to explaining the graphics pipeline. So it's more of a reference book I guess.

Now I already started reading the book by Luna. And ALL of the stuff I wrote about the latter book by Jason Zink and his pals is the info I gathered on internet, from reviews etc. So my question is :
Is there anybody who read any or both of these books ? I want your opinions. Should I pause the current book I'm reading and start the other one ? Or should I first finish this, then read that ?
Luna's book is really good and I'm into it. But I wanted to know what you guys think.
If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain" - Morpheus

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bshivam2001
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Re: Which book should I choose ?

Post by bshivam2001 » October 15th, 2014, 10:07 am

According to me, you should continue with Luna's book. It covers the just everything you will need to program simple 3D games. But there is a problem. As far as I know, the book uses D3DX (used to be part of DirectX API) to do many useful stuff like loading meshes and sprites. The problem is that Microsoft has discontinued D3DX and now it is not included in Windows 8.x SDK. You may still be able to program using D3DX as it is a part of the DirectX SDK (June 2010) but you can't share it people using Windows 8.
Microsoft recommends using DirectX Tool Kit as a replacement for D3DX. You can find DirectX Tool Kit here. This page provides more info on why was D3DX removed and how to use the DirectX Tool Kit.
For your question, I would recommend you to continue with Luna's book and use DirectX tool kit wherever it uses D3DX functions.
'If you can't make it good, at least make it look good'

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BurakCanik
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Joined: February 8th, 2014, 9:16 pm
Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Re: Which book should I choose ?

Post by BurakCanik » October 15th, 2014, 3:00 pm

Thanks bshivam2001 I'll look into DirectX Tool Kit right away.
If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain" - Morpheus

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