Black Art of 3D Game Programming (1995)
Andre LaMothe's prior book, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, was literally life changing for me.<p>I was in my late junior or early senior year of high school when it came out.  My stepfather had a 386/20 and then later a 486/33, a Borland C compiler, and a generic 700 page "Learn C" book at home, and I had worked all the way through the book.  But I couldn't for the life of me figure how in the world to bridge the gap between the extremely slow, "high res" 16 color graphics libraries that came with the compiler, on the one hand, and what Wolfenstein and Doom were doing, on the other, both of which I was utterly entranced by.<p>And then I saw LaMothe's book on a random shopping trip to... Software Etc, I think?  I'd never seen anything like it.  And I knew I had to have it, immediately.<p>After getting that book, I was diving headlong into relatively fast VGA C programming in mode 13h (320x200x256 color).  I spent the afternoons of my senior year of high school writing relatively fast texture mapping routines and trying to get full screen 30+ fps interactive scenes and levels running, which I think I mostly did.  I had to write my own paint program, too, for 256 color palettized textures.  It was thrilling.<p>Thanks largely to my time with that book, later when I was introduced to the internet the first week I started a Computer Science program at college, I was primed to dive into all the awesome C open source game libraries and tools (like Allegro and DJGPP) that I found online, and I was making commercial games and working in the guts of the Quake and Quake 2 code bases two short years later.  (The book and then the internet were not, however, great for my college career)<p>I know there are corny parts of the book, and maybe things that weren't as cutting edge as they claimed to be.  It doesn't teach you how to actually write actual Doom, of course.<p>But prior to the widespread roll out of the internet, it's hard to get across just how inaccessible most of the knowledge in the book was, at least for a high school kid like me.  It really was like turning on a light switch when I got it.  Sometimes something is just at the right place at the right time for someone, and that's what that book was for me.