Hi guys, I was reading trough Real-Time 3D Rendering with DirectX and HLSL, the bookuses NVidia FX Composer for the examples but since that software is abandoned and doesn't support DirectX11 I was wondering: what is a similar software more up to date that I can use to practice with HLSL and making shaders?

Honestly I would recommend Unity. It's obviously a sledgehammer where a smaller too is required... But pretty much contains the feature set of something like FX Composer within its editor. They have their own wacky shader format, but it's based on Cg/HLSL originally so will be similar. 

Thanks Hodgman, I'll consider that as well in case I don't find anything closer to FX Composer.

I've also found this one trough google called ShaderFlex, do you guys know anything about it?

On that page it says 

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ShaderFlex™ is a powerful stand-alone GPU shader authoring environment for DirectX 11 similar to legacy tools like NVidia FX Composer and AMD RenderMonkey.

but it also says

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NOTE: ShaderFlex is still in development and a beta program is planned for later this year. 

and I have no idea if "this years" means 2018 or if is an old abandoned page ?

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I have no idea if "this years" means 2018 or if is an old abandoned page

The last videos from ShaderFlex on their YouTube channel were posted ~3 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEljvElA7sJqMr_wy4Agdcw/videos

Which would line up with their mention of the Oculus DK1 and DK2, but not CV1 or Vive.

There is also ShaderToy, if you're happy to be limited to ~OpenGLES 2.0, though its always just crashed the browser on my home PC.

I'd second Unity - its big, but it auto-compiles, has good compile time error reporting through the VS interop, and between the scene view and inspector material preview (where btw you can also tweak material parameters in real-time), gives nice visual feedback.