If you intend to use this book to learn HLSL or Cg, I strongly advise against it. It could be a reasonable reference book, but definitely not a book for learning.

First of all, the writing is terrible. Grammar errors everywhere make tons of descriptions hard to comprehend.

Second, incorrect examples everywhere. I suggest the author should at least cut and paste his codes from working programs. Give some examples:

- All the bold fonted ID3DXEffect** effect intefaces in Chapter 11 were mis-spelled. It should contain one single I in all these D3DEffect**, not Double I. (The author had it wrong for all of them, i.e. IID3DXEffect** throughout the entire chapter.)

- page 46, Function name is called "lighing" while the caller site called "light(.." This program will not work.

- page 54, COLOR0 was defined as a float2, while the Color returned by function Light_PointSpecular is returned as a float4.

- page 58, function Light-PointDiffuse, the hyphen was written as a underscore in the caller site. In the same example, Light1_Color was used as an argument (so does the example in page 60), however, it was not defined anywhere in the code other than used as an passing argument.

to name a few ...

This book is a good introduction to HLSL, and works great as a reference guide. The author's writing style is very synthetic and straight to the point. Would love to see something like this for GLSL.

This makes a good companion reference to the DirectX SDK. The HLSL Intrinsic Function Reference included as an appendix is especially good, citing the supported shader versions and performance considerations for each entry.

If you're just getting started with Direct3D or shaders, then this is probably not the right book for you (instead, check out "Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists" by the same author). Although this book does cover some bare-bones and basic shaders, it's probably better to use this book if you are looking for reference information not found in the SDK.

Also note that this book is based on the Summer 2004 DirectX SDK. The best parts of the book are still absolutely current, but it would be wise to keep a copy of the latest SDK docs handy just in case.

This book starts out by giving you a good history behind the shader language.

Pro:
- really good for references
- it lists every single variables/functions for the shader along with the description
- excellent information/reference on Intrinsic Functions
- it has a good list of vertex shader 3.0 assembly instructions

Con:
- need more samples? :)

Overall, I found this book is good to start learning HLSL. Besure that you've grabbed a concept of direct3d before reading this book. I also find out that after reading this book it's so much easy to read wolf's books.