As does SDL itself, this book tries to be too many things to too many people, and ends up being woefully shallow.It would better have separated "object-oriented" concepts from the SDL language itself, instead of interleaving the two in a tangle of tedious examples, missing details and a basically useless reference index.It might also have addressed the pitfalls of SDL and how they are treated in 'the real world', i.e., by patching in "C".As it is, it conveys the concept that SDL is useful for building academic models using a nifty block diagram editor. I could have gleaned this from the Telelogic sales brochure, thus saving myself 40 bucks or so.