Review: Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11

Frank Luna’s DirectX series has been the go to book for DirectX development for many years. Although there are other great resources, Luna’s writing is both informative and approachable. The book also covers a broad range of topics from the basic lighting, texturing, and blending, to terrain rendering, normal and displacement mapping, geometry and compute shaders and more. He even tackles some tough topics like shadow mapping and ambient occlusion in a way that is understandable. Overall a lot of good material in a package that’s a bit under 900 pages.

The book assumes you have some knowledge of graphics and C++ programming, though it does go over some of the basics at the beginning. So you don’t need to be a graphics wizard to read this book, but you should at least have a firm grasp of C++ and some idea about 3D mathematics. Though you don’t need previous knowledge of DirectX. I had some experience with DirectX 9 going in, and I was still surprised about some of the changes with DirectX 11. Although the basic concepts are the same (using vertex and index buffers, for example), the code to accomplish things were very different in places.  That said, Luna’s style made even some of the denser code snippets manageable.

Luckily, the included samples did compile with only minor changes to the project properties. I purchased the Kindle e-book, but was able to download the samples from the website. Although I enjoyed the e-book, I will make note that many of the code snippets didn’t look great on the device. This is a common problem with programming books on the Kindle, where code that should be on one line spans multiple lines and makes a mess of the original print formatting. Unfortunately this book is not much better in that regard. Even so, I was still able to follow the code. I just wish more care would be taken with the formatting.

All in all, a great resource and should not be missed if you plan on writing a game or engine with DirectX 11.