This book is a spectacular find for anyone who has learned C++, understands DirectX or OpenGL, and is looking for a guide on how to actually develop a well-structured C++ video game. The book itself is actually a little underwhelming in my opinion - the text is so dense and wordy that I simply can't keep my concentration for more than a few pages at once. Chapters on topics like UML or Risk Analysis, while insightful, simply don't do anything to make seemingly-dull topics seem anything but dull. The book gets 2 stars on its own.
The glory of this package - the beautiful, incredible magic of the package - comes from the attached CD. The book is supposed to guide you through the development of a full video game, and to that end they have written an impressively large game called Ankh. In order to help see the development of a game, they supply a full design document for the game, including almost 100 mini-requirements that the game is supposed to meet from a technological perspective. They then broke it up into 15 'Stripes', or different levels of completion. Stripe 1 is nothing more than the main menu of the program, and then it is slowly built up to a fully working program.
If you are a self-motivator, and you want to be a game programmer to the point that you will pour over source code until you understand every bit of it (and really, to make it in this industry, this is the kind of programmer you need to be), then this is a godsend. You will see the actual development of a complete 3D game from start to finish. It is fully OO, programmed in 100% C++, and you are going to be amazed as you watch it come together. Take the source apart, look at what they add from stripe to stripe, and see how it all comes together.
Seriously, this CD was EXACTLY what I needed to take my C++ books and my DirectX books and learn how to bring them together into a knowledge of software engineering. The book itself is so dull that in 7 years of owning it I have never read more than 100 pages of it. But the CD... oh, this CD was key in my formative days. If you are looking to really learn how object oriented game programming comes about, do whatever you can to get ahold of this CD. It is going to provide you with months of educational gold.
Edit 12/18/12: Windows 7 no longer ships with the DirectMusic headers and libraries that this code base relies on. As such, the sound code 100% does not build under Windows Vista/7. If you want to get ahold of this book and play with the code (which is still pretty useful), you will find it much more manageable under Windows XP.
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