   Starting DirectX Programming
  Hey there, I've just finished some windows programming with c++ courses and programmed a few games(retro stuff ofcourse) with win32! I'm just thinking of moving to DirectX for some serious stuff but the only source for studying available for me is a set of books that are extremely covering but are written in 2003! I don't know if reading them is a good thing or not, I'm afraid the features and techniques are not used anymore, though they're talking about D3D9!can any help me with this, should i put 6 months on  stuying these books or i shold look for a newer version?   
  hmm... its a tough one.If you are new to DX then I would personally suggest looking at some of the many tutorials dotted around the internet and in the resources part of this site. You'll find it frustrating coming across depreciated classes that some of those books will reference as a beginner. Scratching your head wondering what you can replace depreciated classes with and also playing about with unicode and multi-byte characters. (that's what I did when I started)Having said that most books (if its a good one) won't spoon feed you but rather explain the systems and processes in order for you to interpret it for yourself and apply it to your own code. The majority of it won't be outdated and will remain relevant for years to come but this is only something I've been able to harness as I've become more experienced as a developer.   ;  I would recommend you look for a book on 3D graphics concepts -- such as "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 3rd Ed." and buy that instead. You may need to augment that with a good book on linear algebra if you are weak in that domain (try "The Geometry Toolbox"). If you work through that book you should be able to pick up what you need to know about DirectX via the (free and current) API documentation alone.   