DirectX+HLSL/Graphics/Compute All-in-One (Paperback)

Not quite what I expected from the description, but there is material here.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. Some of the material is available elsewhere, but rarely presented this clearly. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. Fine, but there are stronger books on the same subject if you look around.

Mixed feelings. The good parts are genuinely good; the rest is forgettable.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The explanations are careful without being condescending, which is a difficult balance to strike. The examples are small enough to type out and experiment with, which is exactly what I want from a book like this. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. Borrow it first if you can, or at least check the table of contents carefully before buying.

A useful guide. The examples assume a particular environment, but that is fixable.

This is the third book I have read on computer graphics this year, and it is comfortably the best of them. The writing is direct and does not waste space on filler, which I value in a technical book. The balance between theory and practice is well judged; neither side dominates. Four stars, and I suspect a second edition could easily push it to five.