content: First and foremost this book was written when directX 5 was the standard. Now we are up to 7/8 and I assume there have been many changes, at least there are some examples in the DirectX 7 SDK which use functions not covered in this book. The lack of complete code examples or exercies means this is definately not a tutorial and there are no tables to indicate it is a reference book. In fact, the book seems to be a collection of ramblings about directX and computer graphics in general. Maybe this was never intended to be a reference or a tutorial, but either would have probably been more useful.