I''m 16 years old and i''ve been programming for about 2 years. I''ve got a good grasp on c/c++. I understand classes, struct, linked lists, trees, sorting, memory allocation, and all that good stuff and I can write them without copying code or anything. I want to learn windows programming, opengl, and directx. I can program OpenGL pretty decent. I''ve made a particle system like Nehe''s and played around with the code and made some simple things. www.geocities.com/david_sulock/space.zip is probably the best thing i''ve made. I was going to make that into a game but I decided it would take too long. I just bought 4 books: Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus , OpenGL Game Programming, Mathematics for 3d Game Programming and Computer Graphics, and game programming gems. They should come in the mail relatively soon and I plan on reading them all. I''ve got a good grasp on math too, i''ve taken AP calculus and AP computer science at my high school. My current school doesn''t have any more math or computer science courses and I''m sophomore so I am looking forward to learning from books. Anyways, I just wanted some suggestions on books to buy, stuff to make, and tutorials to read. I always set my sights too high when I am trying to program and never get the game finished! If anybody has any advice or anything like that I''d like to know. I don''t really know what I should be doing right now. Reading? Programming? Both? Should I be working on a big game or small games or demos or what? Thanks for your help!

Winprog is a good place to start with Win32 programming.

Invader X
Invader''s Realm

I''d recommend you to try making small games. Then a bit bigger games. Then even bigger. That is, until you find yourself developing the next Quake I did those steps in the beginning (well, not until the Quake ), and it worked fine on me.

quote: I always set my sights too high when I am trying to program and never get the game finished!

Try to face proyects you are sure you''ll be able to finish. And work in those until you finish them! Developing an entire project will help you a lot more than making half one.

Just my advice, hope it helps.

Maybe you could also find some useful thoughts in the subject in my EDIA postmortem article. It''s about the way I developed a game two years ago, maybe you want to take a sight on it.

Best regards,

--DK
--H. Hernán Moraldo
http://www.hhm.com.ar/
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If you can, swap "Tricks..." for "Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold. I reckon you''re well past most of tricks and Petzold is the bible of Windows programming. Combine Petzold with Winprog''s tutorial and you''ll be flying on the Windows front.