Looks like a Duck

It has been a few days playing with DirectX and the tutorials from MSDN.  As tutorials go, the MSDN collection is fairly weak.  Lots of steps missing that you need to go research or already know.  Very little in the way of explanation.  On the upside it was nice to know that I could fill in the holes myself, and that I have learned quite a bit so far.

Like the Win32 API, DirectX (at least version 9) is much closer to C than C++.  Even glancing up at version 10 and 11, it is still very much the same. One of the scary parts I found was:

if(FAILED(g_pVB->Lock(0, 0, (void**)&pVertices, 0)))
        return E_FAIL;

Egads.  Casting void pointer to pointer of a reference.  Perfectly legitimate C code, and quite common to see.  But always a construction that makes me curious about the "power" of C when you need to go though some interesting hoops to pass the data you need around.  Ideally this would be a rare thing.  You take care of this level of detail once in your lower level engine code and not worry about it when you are designing your game at the upper level. 

So now to find some more in depth information.  Looks like I am finally signing up for Safari Books again.  Primarily because the one book that is recommended to me is out of print, but is available there for reading online.  This way I can take a look at other books as well and determine which ones I will want to purchase for my own library.