need programming books

[MrPink]

before this gets moved to the programming section (which no one is ever in), can anyone recommend a great programming book? i'm talking a well established series or author, like "chicken soup for the programmer's soul" or whatever.

yes, i know there are countless free online tutorials on teaching C, C++, Java, or whatever. but these online tutorials lack the centralization and quality of a published novel written by an author who has spent longer than a few days working on the said tutorial/guide.

preferably, i would like a book that comes with its own compiler, since the book can give instructions and pictures under the context of that compiler. it serves as a "control", something that both me and the author of the book can relate to, which makes learning easier for me.

EDIT: also, any book about really complex/abstract things about graphics technology or abstraction layers or whatever. so, books about video rendering, which i know nothing about. any books about how an OS works, preferably windows since it is the one i see myself spending the most time with in my future. anything about abstraction layers, kernel drivers, z-buffer, rastering, right now these are just words to me. any book that could teach me something about these words would be helpful. thnx for reading

[Proto]

The Head First series by O'Reilly for Java programming are probably the most didactic books I've seen about anything. Really, both if you know little or quite a bit about programming, these books are written well enough for the learning experience to be both fulfilling and entertaining. Highly recommended.

About OS functioning, personally I have only had experience with Tanenbaum and Stalling's books. Personally I would endorse Tanenbaum's, even if the book is slow at times it is considered an obligated reference book at the academia.

[mudlord]

also, any book about really complex/abstract things about graphics technology or abstraction layers or whatever. so, books about video rendering, which i know nothing about. any books about how an OS works, preferably windows since it is the one i see myself spending the most time with in my future. anything about abstraction layers, kernel drivers, z-buffer, rastering, right now these are just words to me. any book that could teach me something about these words would be helpful. thnx for reading

In that case:
"Programming Pixel and Vertex Shaders" by Wolfgang Engel
"Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold
"Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science" by John Zelle
"Art of Assembly" by Randy Heit
"OpenGL Distilled" by Paul Martz
"Creating Games in C++: A Step-by-Step Guide" by David Conger & Ron Little
Iczelion's Windows assembly tutorial series
"DirectX 3D Graphics Programming Bible" by Julio Sanchez and Marla P. Canton
"OpenGL(R) Shading Language (2nd Edition)" by Randi Rost

[MrPink]

tanenbaum...reminds me of bioshock

can you give me some titles for tanenbaum and stalling? i will definitely look into "Head First" and O'Reilly. also, know any good C++ books, or C, by authors on the same level (in your opinion) as O'Reilly?

thnx for the recommendations, I will definitely look into these

edit: awesome, awesome, awesome mudlord! thank you so much. just the titles of the books makes them appealing. do you own all of these? how much $$$ we talking about, also are most of these available in barnes & noble, or on amazon?

[skoreanime]

Amazon has a high chance of having books like these. I ordered a buncha programming books from there .

[mudlord]

awesome, awesome, awesome mudlord! thank you so much. just the titles of the books makes them appealing. do you own all of these? how much $$$ we talking about, also are most of these available in barnes & noble, or on amazon?

You can get almost or all of them on Amazon (I got some of those from my university's bookshop, especially Zelle's work. Which I 100% recommend as a 1st buy). Iczelion's tutorials are all bundled into a eBook, which you can get for free. Same goes for the legal eBook version of Art of Assembly (whereas the print version. of course, costs money).

Here's Zelle's book on Amazon, if your interested.

[MrPink]

i am most definitely interested! i have wanted to dive into programming for a while now, but have never had the motivation to look up and adhere to an online tutorial on a language. i am going to college this fall as a freshman, but I will be in the Game Design & Development major, which is more graphic design and working with pre made game engines than nitty gritty coding.

hopefully i can be self-taught, thanks again for all the book recommendations!

[blueshogun96]

I'm not sure how in depth you plan on getting, but if you are planning to know everything about programming (for games too), I recommend you learn the 3D math that goes behind all the graphics and not just rely on the 3rd party libraries and middleware to do everything for you. A truly skilled programmer can write all of his engine tools from scratch. Any book written by Andre Lamothe is a very good read as it goes very in depth about each topic. David Astle is also a great author of many programming books. I have loads of books and are more than willing to reccomend more. Don't be afraid to pick up some older books too. Even the older books that teach DirectDraw have some extremely valuable information in them (not about the API itself, but the underlying principles and techniques of game programming in general). I personally like using DirectDraw for 2D stuff rather than Direct3D because of all of the missing functionality DirectX 9 has (i.e. Raster Operations, Querying textures from surfaces, etc.) but I'll leave that up to you.

I own lots of C/C++ programming as well as graphics and other books related to programming. My collection dates all the way back to DirectX 2 (that's right, I've been around a while ). If you're interested you can see my collection below:

General Programming:
1. Microsoft Visual C++ .NET by Don Gosselin (2002)
2. C Nitty Gritty
3. C++ For Dummies
4. Assembly Language Step by Step

Game/Graphics Programming:
1. AI For Game Developers
2. Physics for Game Developers
3. Geometric Programming Using Open Geometry GL 2.0
4. LINUX Graphics Programming with SVGALib
5. Win32 Game Developers Guide DirectX 3.0
6. Isometric Game Programming with DirectX 7.0
7. Real Time Strategy Game Programming with DirectX 6.0
8. Game Coding Complete (Second Edition)
9. Beginning OpenGL Game Programming (OpenGL 1.5)
10. Beginning Game Audio Programming
11. More OpenGL Game Programming
12. Awesome Power of Direct3D/DirectX, The (DirectX 3.0 and 5.0)
13. Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus
14. Tricsk of the 3D Game Programming Gurus
15. OpenGL Shading Language (Second Edition)
16. Programming RPG Games with DirectX (DirectX 8.0)
17. Beginning Game Programming (DirectX 9.0b+)
18. Zen of Direct3D Game Programming, The (DirectX 8.0)
19. The Cg Tutorial <- Shader language for DirectX and OpenGL
20. GPU Gems 2
21. Spells of Fury (DirectX 2.0) <- Very Old!

Misc Game Related:
1. 3dsMax 9 Essentials
2. 3D Game Textures
3. Business & Legal Primer for Game Development <- Very good book
4. Paid To Play

Misc Programming:
1. HTML
2. Reversing: Secrets of Reverse engineering (Requires in depth x86 and Windows Kernel knowledge to understand)

That's all of mine. NVIDIA's dev site has some great graphics programming books too (The GPU Gems series and The Cg Tutorial), plus lots of whitepapers that explain various graphics techniques (i.e. Toon Shading, Vertex Blending, Volumetric Explosions, Optimizing for GeForce cards, Various types of shadow mapping, etc.) for both Direct3D and OpenGL. IMO some of the most useful whitepapers will be written in Direct3D7, but the principles are the same for Direct3D9 and OpenGL so porting will be a snap. I hope that I was able to help you. Click here to read the whitepapers. They are very well organized, but I recommend reading the oldest ones first (DX7). While you're at it, get your hands on the dev tools as you see fit (such as the SDK, it's VERY helpful). ATI has some whitepapers and SDKs too, but I haven't looked at those in a long time. This is the best I could do in one post

btw, did I recommend the right type of books you wanted? If not, sorry But if you ever need a good book recommendation, you can always ask me