programming

Granted writing books on game programming isn't new, it's rare for those to be as fundamentally complete as Tricks. I've seen opinions from those who believe they'd rather see Lamothe write a book about 'How To Program Unreal II', but what would that take? A few dozen 1000-page volumes? If you're at a level that necessitates the need for such advanced education, you won't be shopping for such a book--you'd be writing and publishing the games! Rather, Lamothe has thoroughly nailed down the tracks of all aspects of game programming, from A to Z.
Having previously read through his Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, First Edition, Lamothe has made another important delivery to the beginning game programmer with this Second Edition by updating it to keep pace with the latest gaming technology. If you seek out a career in this reassuring field, but know little of game programming, I highly recommend this book. The next logical step would be towards advanced DirectX programming, set within the 3D stage, which Andre' Lamothe is finalizing with his next book, "Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus, Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization." I look forward to reading it, and applaud his work!

For starters, i know when i see a quality game programming book..
(i own 27 different books and this is one of my best 3!). This book wont teach you how to program in a particular language, for that you need a whole series of other books (for a quick crashcourse on C++, i recommend "C++ Weekend Crash Course" by Stephen R. Davis).
What this book WILL teach you is windows basics, directx basics
then you move on to more advanced topics like:
Graphics, Sound, Input (including force feadback joysticks!!), game physics, game Artifical Intelegence, and lots more!!.... Plus some thing i didnt find in other books, a whole chapter on how to program old text based games, some of you may ask "why would i need to learn that?!" (my friends did!). If you played games like Quake2 or Alien vs. Predator, you may have noticed they have command based ingame consoles (~ key), which allows you to input commands which affect the game at runtime (like cheats.), learn this and you'll be able to make a commandline based engine for your game.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?? BUY THIS GREAT BOOK!! :-)

If you're intersted in game programming on the PC, then this is definitely a good starting point. LaMothe is highly regarded in the industry as a talented writer, and this book proves that. LaMothe starts you off with some Win32 concepts and then leads you down the DirectX path (learn OpenGL as well if you care about portability).

Many people gripe about this style of language, and I can understand why. English is an international language, yet not everyone will understand his use of colloquial American slang. But then again, if you play games, you've probably heard it all before....