Quote:
Originally posted by confuted
Cat, you're wrong. It's possible to learn even advanced stuff online. There is a lot of interest in 3d graphics programming. There are tons of tutorials on just generally "why" we do different things in an engine, without any API specific code. And then there are tutorials which tell you how to write the code for the API. Then there's the official documentation, which is the source of the knowledge for any book authors. It's not like the book authors are making up the techniques - it's all documented in the SDK and such beforehand. It's just a matter of reading. A lot of people do better with a book, because all the information is presented to them right there and it's easy - I'll give you that. But I refuse to say that it's impossible to learn it without a book, because if it was, nobody would know it.
I never said you couldn't learn about products from their documentation -- of course you can. If you already understood the fundamentals and mathematics of 3D graphics, you could learn DirectX in its entirety based solely on the rather large set of information about it from Microsoft. And I've learned things in that fashion before, and a good engineer or programmer can gain a lot of insight from the docs.