programming

I'm surprised that this book is ranked so well, I imagine most people simply buy it and never use it (a common problem with game developer books).

The problem with this particular book is that a bunch of ideas are presented, but very rarely are they worked through. For example there is an article on rendering ocean water. The shader is pulled apart (somewhat) in the short article, but that's it. There is no source code on the CD for this or many of the other chapters. The shader is written in an undocumented HLSL. And there is no excerpt showing how the constant registers / vertices are passed! So you end up with explanations like:
// c14 - { waveDirX0, waveDirX1, waveDirX2, waveDirX3 }
Which is 100% useless. There is no explanation of how the wave direction parameters are generated or updated. Certainly one can do further research to solve problems like this, but at that point the book has no use.

The use of a non-standard HLSL is perhaps the most aggravating part of the book. It's bad enough that we have to deal with CG, DX9 FX, VSH, PSH, and all that. But to introduce a fourth-party API, which isn't even very well covered - that's criminal.

I applaud the idea of collecting a bunch of shaders into a book for examples. But the authors should have made the minimal commitment of using the same API and documenting the data flow to the shaders.

A very disappointing purchase.

Shaders are the direction of real time graphics programming for games and other applications. They were introduced in their first versions with DX8 hardware like the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 and are continouisly extended in further version of hardware and software like in the new DX9 class of hardware.
It is industry wide consensus that shaders are the way to get cool graphics in realtime games. But there has always been a lack of good documentation about what shaders are and their possibilities. This book was made to address it. It is designed to handle the DX8 API way of shaders together with lots of DX8 samples but the principles apply to OpenGL shader programming also.

The book is splittet into two parts.

The first part is a thorough introduction about vertex and pixel shaders written by editor Wolfgang Engel. It explains the reasoning behind the shaders, the definitions of the virtual machines, and all assembler commands available. For each type of shaders there is also an introductionary example section for getting first successful shader programs running. It is well written with lots of information.

The second part is a collection of shader gems - short articles by differenct authors. Among the authors are people from developer relations from nVidia, Matrox and ATI as well as graphics programmers from inside the gaming industry. These authors have lots of experience programming shaders and they show in short sections what's possible and how to get there.

This book is standing in my bookshelf and in the bookshelves of a lot of professional developers worldwide.

I highly recommend buying it.

This is a very poorly put together book. It's organized as a series of small articles, but the article sizes vary widely and many of them contradict others. ...
It definately has some useful information in there, but it's tough to extract through the poor organization and formatting.