Nearest Book Meme

Okay, okay, everyone else is doing it, so I will too:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I have on my desk two books, pretty much equally close to me: "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10" and "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach", both by Frank Luna.

From the D10 book:

"In addition, we discuss the intrinsic clip function, which enables us to mask out certain parts of an image; this can be used to implement fences and gates, for example."

and from the D9 book:

"The D3DX library provides the following function to compute a plane given three points on the plane: [prototype of D3DXPlaneFromPoints]."

No, I'm not doing any game programming, I'm just trying learn how to do 3D graphics and use my GPU -- using D3DImage, natch. (Turns out D3DImage only supports D9, not D10, so I had to go buy the older edition too.)

Good books, by the way: mathematics is not glossed over, but kept to the required essentials; good mix of theory and practice; reasonable examples; diagrams & pictures not so good in the D9 edition but much improved for D10. Much better than the other books on the subject, which tend to the pulpy "How to be a GAME PROGRAMMER in 21 days!!!" dreck. In fact, Luna could drop the word "game" from the title with very little content change, but I suspect his publisher would object.