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Zen of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash Highly Recommended

ISBN: 1-883-57708-x       Publisher: Coriolis Group       Pages: 712 pages+disk       Price: £38-99

Categories:   graphics     games     internals and hardware     assembler

Reviewed by Shanawaz Basith in C Vu 7-6 (Sep 1995)

The book is a mass of information containing lots of example C and assembly code. It is based on a set of magazine articles that have been enhanced and some new material added. The first ten chapters describe the innards of VGA programming. Everything presented has been optimised, so fast lines, circles and polygons are covered.

The thing that makes this book a real gem is the section on Mode-X (also covering Mode-X animation), information is hard to come by for this undocumented graphics mode, almost everything you need to know about Mode X is described.

The book saves a lot of wear on your fingers by providing the source code and Abrash's own graphics library (XSharp) on an enclosed disc. The book expects a bit of background knowledge and I would not recommend it to a beginner. My room-mate who is more experienced at PC programming thinks that the book should be on every PC graphics programmer's shelf, I tend to agree. The price is a bit on the expensive side. The book would have been helped tremendously with some colour plates from the example programs. Also you may find that the source code in the book is too long and perhaps snippets from the material on disc would have been better. Overall the book is very well written, contains much useful information and is well complemented with lots of example code; a real treasure trove.