Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)

Nice to see this here, thanks for sharing it cmsimike.<p>This was a labor of love&#x2F;appreciation for me a couple of years ago over a Christmas break. I went through a retro gamedev period during that break, read a few books like Masters of Doom, and found myself trying to read through the various (relatively poor quality) electronic copies of the Black Book that were floating around. Yak shaving being what it is, I spent most of my Christmas break scraping and cleaning up a few different copies to put this together so I could (more comfortably) read it on my Kindle.<p>FWIW, these conversions were done with an eye for preserving an interesting piece of gaming&#x2F;graphics programming history, and aren&#x27;t really intended to be relevant today.<p>I also converted the Zen of Assembly Language also by Abrash[1], but it&#x27;s considerably less relevant than the Black Book in general.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jagregory&#x2F;abrash-zen-of-asm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jagregory&#x2F;abrash-zen-of-asm</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You&#x27;re much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable).<p>The &quot;tricks&quot; are nice but don&#x27;t translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.

You shouldn&#x27;t read this book to learn modern practices. You should read it to improve your way of thinking about problems. The book is timeless if you think about it this way.

Its hugely dated, but I really treasured my copy (its still somewhere in the attic since I put the ebook on my iPad). From a &#x27;how to program DOS graphics&#x27; it is nominally useless but as a holistic look at ways to get around problems that were designed in by engineers who didn&#x27;t think about graphics performance it is still fun.

Excellent book.<p>If nothing else, the chapter intros are definitely still relevant(informative and hilarious at the same time).

The book is now out of print, and hard to come by. Last time I checked, it was going for over $200 on ebay.