With Wolfgang Engel’s blessing, I’ve added the ShaderX2 books’ (both of them) CD-ROM code samples as zip files and put links in the ShaderX guide. The code is hardly bleeding edge at this point, of course, but code doesn’t rot – there are many bits that are still useful. I’ve also folded in most of the code addenda into the distributions themselves. The only exception at this point is Thomas Rued’s stereographic rendering shaders; in reality, more up-to-date information (and SDK) is available from the company he works with, ColorCode 3-D.
Actually, it does. =)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_rot
True enough, code rot does happen whenever an API is used – I’ve had NVIDIA demos that no longer can link due to changes in the DirectX utilities, for example. I was thinking more in terms of the algorithms themselves. Such code rarely rots (C and C++ don’t evolve, thankfully). For example, the Graphics Gems code base was started in 1990, and all the C code there still just plain works (though I’m still getting the occasional bug fix, which is all to the good).