Where are the Good Books?

I don’t claim to have read all the DirectX books on the market. These days there’s
such a flood of material that reading everything on any topic would be challenging.
But my DirectX bookshelf has a fair number of books on it now…and none of them
are very good. Most of them are barely any good at all. The one I’ve read most
recently - The
Microsoft DirectX 9 Programmable Graphics Pipeline – was no exception. And
I had such high hopes for it while I was checking it out in the bookstore.

The big problem I have with most books (true particularly for DirectX, but true in
general) is that they go too far in one direction or the other. Either they have almost
no information in them, or they assume that you already know the topic. The worst
are introductory texts that take an academic approach. If I wanted an academic approach,
I’d read the docs or the spec. If I want introductory, then all the formalism
gets in the way. I reviewed a book recently that seemed to have exactly this problem
– it was only a step better than a BNF description of the thing it was talking
about. It just used English instead of { | and }.

Ultimately, I want something that augments the specification/documentation, not replaces
it. A good book has to have the primary goal of setting up a functional model in my
head, so I can figure out on my own why something might work the way it does
when I encounter it in the API. It doesn’t even matter if the model is completely
accurate if the text is introductory – a good analogy that I can ditch later
when I have a more complete understanding of the domain is still extremely helpful
even when it isn’t 100% accurate.

This is how I learn, and therefore this is how I try to teach and how I try to write.
Of course, different people learn different ways, but I just don’t believe that
many are well-served by things that read like my college textbooks.