The most striking feature of this book is its breadth. It spans the entire range of PC graphics, from how to draw simple 2D line figures to using DirectX. A book that has a chapter on the 8514/A as well as chapters on DirectX, current to DirectX 8.1... Now that's impressive. This broad scope allows you to infer perspective, seeing how the state-of-the-art has changed on the PC over the years.

The writing is generally quite clear. I love the fact that this book has code samples in both C and assembler, allowing you to tweak your routines on the low-end for those performance-critical routines, while still allowing you to take a step back and do much of the work in a high-level language. The mixing of C with asm is brilliant. Of course, the later Windows-based routines pretty much require a high-level language, but it's nice to see that opcode-level graphics coding still gets the respect it deserves.

I'm not sure why the previous reviewer thought this book is so obsolete; it's true that much of it talks about DOS-esque graphics coding which many people might argue is obsolete, but it still has a healthy amount of info on cutting-edge technology. Also, much of the book explains the math behind 3D graphics like matrix operations and shading algorithms, which never go obsolete because they are the very foundations upon which most 3D computer graphics are based. If you want a book that's all about 3D SDKs like Direct3D or OpenGL, you would probably be better off with another book, but that's a very one-sided perspective. For the full picture of PC graphics, it's really tough to go wrong with this book. I've yet to find a more well-rounded volume that accomplishes this level of coverage.

If you are a beginner in the computer graphics realm you might be tempted to buy this book as the name handbook sounds promisingly down to earth and hands on.. don't! The contents of this book are 90% obsolete and 10% useless..It should be named Jurassic PC Graphics!