Review: Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes by Kenwright

Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes is a short, no-nonsense, introduction to the Vulkan graphics API. Though the title of the book says “20 minutes,” I believe I spent somewhere between 1 and 2 hours to finish it (though I admittedly read pretty slow). This is the type of book I wish there were more of: something short and sweet as a brief intro to get your feet wet. I feel many programming books can be daunting at 600+ pages, so it’s nice to find something you can complete in one or two sittings.

So what is actually covered in this little book? Basically it shows the basics of how to initialize the Vulkan renderer and draw a triangle on the screen. The author does not use any additional libraries, so it’s only showing the Vulkan API itself and some boilerplate Win32 code for opening a window. Though I had already been reading about Vulkan previously, and didn’t find any new material here, I could see this as a decent first step in learning the API.

To be honest,  Kenwright does not really provide any deep explanation of the concepts presented. It’s basically just showing some of the common function calls and the structure to set things up. You could easily find similar code online (at various sources) for displaying a triangle in Vulkan.  Even so, I still think the text holds value and may be more accessible than some of the larger (and more costly) Vulkan books that do provide more detail. This is sort of something that would be useful if you’ve really never worked with the API before and just want to see how the code looks and if it’s something you’re interested in prior to researching further.

All in all, I can’t really fault  Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes too much. While there were a couple typos and odd use of the English language, overall the book was concise and coherent. It provided a cursory look at a new, exciting, graphics API and it did with with a meager time and money investment on behalf of the reader. While you can find basically the same material online for free, I still personally enjoy learning from books and think the format may click for some people better. It only really scratches the surface, but as a short “first intro” book it’s not bad.