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OpenGL Game Programming w/CD

OpenGL Game Programming w/CD

List Price: $59.99
Your Price: $40.79
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very nice
Review: I really liked this book. IMHO, if you can only get one OpenGL book, this is the book to get. It covers most of the topics that the Red Book and the Opengl Superbible cover, and then some. This is the only one of the three that cover lightmapping, reflections, how to load 3d model files (.md2), Direct Music, and Direct Input. As indicated by some of the features noted (DirectMusic), this book is not just for Opengl, but actually making games with Opengl. The final chapter even has you create a small game engine and fps!

I say that after this book, the only book you need is the Blue Book. If you want to learn more about glut, though, this book won't help (is that really a bad thing?).

The only reason I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 is because the cd I got had the soure code missing. Of course, a few downloads later, it was on my hard drive anyways, and I hear that they've corrected the problem now anyways. So, it shouldn't be a problem for you. Really, I think this should be 4.5 stars because this isn't such a major issue.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Great Book For Great to be 3D game programmers.
Review: I bought this book a few days ago. While having a million OpenGL online tutorials. I found this book much more usefull. Iam suprised at the people that gave it below a 4 possibly since they want to learn Open GL in seconds and dont read the book but skim it. But its a great book showing you 3D concepts and how to use Open GL. I highly recommend this book for anyone who knows C\C++ and wants to make 3D games or for anyone like myself that "was" still puzzled with 3D concepts and programming. The only thing I didnt like about this book was it incorparates Direct X. But any good programmer can see there selves around using DX in a Open Gl app. A must buy for any of you future game programmers.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Don't buy this book.
Review: This book is so bad I don't even know where to start...

1) not once do the even draw the default axis!
2) there's no discussion about performance and what you should do, shouldn't do, nothing, zip, nada
3) the code is CRAP. some of it is missing, some of it is broken, all of it is the worst code I've ever seen -- they put implementations in the header files!
4) none of the real-world sorts of issues are covered -- multiple textures stuffed into a single file for "stamping", texture compression, LOD adjustments, etc.
5) it's basically all fluff, if you cropped and cleaned, it would be half as thick and kill half as many trees. it would still be terrible though.

Don't buy this. Really.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Useful for beginners, but beware
Review: Has some useful ideas for absolute beginners who don't know anything at all about graphics programming or game design, but unfortunately, the authors' knowledge of these subjects is not much greater than your own, if you are one of those readers. Many, many mistakes. Poorly-written demonstrations that inadequately show off the OpenGL features while exhibiting abysmal programming style. Personally, I can't get past the fact that they don't seem to know how many bits are in a byte (early in the book they state that a 8-bit unsigned integer is 2 bytes!). That, and the fact that most of what you're paying for in this book is the same wrapper source code repeated over and over throughout every chapter. We don't need the same WndProc function you defined in Chapter 1 reproduced on every other page!

Graphics demos are writtenly terribly inefficiently, as if the authors did not understand when the GL function calls needed to be called and run *extremely* slowly. They reset the geometry on every rendering pass, for crying out loud!

If you don't know anything at all about graphics programming and want an introductory guide, you're better off starting with the on-line documentation available at opengl.org. If you require more than a rudimentary understanding, this is definitely a waste of money.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Simply the best
Review: OpenGL Game programming is, in my opinion, the best Game programming book for beginners now availabe on the market. First of all it is the only one based on OpenGL instead of Direct X. The MS API seems to become a standard for professional game developers,but...well, leave it to pro's, if you want to grasp the basic of graphic programming and to achieve some results in a reasonable short time , OpenGL is the only choice, thanks to its intuitive architecture. Apart from it, this book is a perfect balance between theory and practice and I could find every thing I have been looking for. Kevin and Dave are the founders of the the most popular Game developper comunity on the Web. Probably they know the needs and difficulties of beginners much better than professional people. The all book is at high level, but there are two chapters that are really gems. chap 18 - working with 3d models. it explains the architecture of .md2 (Quake 2)animated file, how to load it, how to use it.

None of the 4 game programming I have read went throuh in detail a so important topic. this book dedicates more than 50 pages and it is all meat. Chap 20 - building a game engine It provides a object-oriented game engine to be used to develop simple games quickly and efficiently. Again none of the other books supply a so important tool.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: I thought this book was going to be a useful reference about OpenGL programming because it was nice and thick and contained lots of examples. But Most of the book is just filled with sloppily-written code, a lot of it Windows-centric. Topics are poorly explained, the code doesn't even work half the time, and a lot is left out. The authors are obviously not qualified to teach this topic well, and the book has an amateur-ish feeling to it. I highly recommend The OpenGL Programmimng Guide or the OpenGL SuperBible instead.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Crappy book
Review: The book is crap. Many of their examples wont even compile (because the code has errors) but somehow they managed to give you .exe files but those just crash because the code is wrong (I have no idea how they managed to compile this crap). Their coding style sucks especially when they try and give you OO (object oriented) examples. If you want to learn OpenGL I would recommend "OpenGL Programming Guide".
I found absolutely nothing usefull in this book.
It's hard to explain how bad this book sucks so I'll put it this way: I have purchase 40+ programming type books from amazon.com (and read them) and this is the only book I've reviwed because I thought it needed to be known how crappy this book is.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: must have for game programmers
Review: I am a student at full sail real world college in winter park florida. This is a book you must have in your collection. Not only does this book just talks about basic programming, it goes in to topics ( which includes the source code written from scratch ) like partcle systems ( very useful ), model loading, terrain following, DirectSound, etc. Get this book, my roommate is currenlty using this book left and right to help him get by on his final college project at full sail: Making a video game. Buy this book. Recommended by a full sail game design student.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Basic OpenGL guide to game programming
Review: This book won't teach you openGL and I would recommend the Red Book for that or various online tutorial sites.... What it will teach you is how to use openGL to create things like particle systems, an MD2 file loader and renderer, simple terrain system, font rendering, and simple refection and shadow models. The only thing I didnt like is the chapters on DirectSound, Direct Input and setting up openGL under windows OS. These chapters should have been removed. The GLUT library should have been used and explained which would have handled the input and setup window issues. Pretty much everything in this book can be found in online tutorials.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: OpenGL expertise required!
Review: My expectation was this book would provide a working knowledge of OpenGL. Not enough coverage was dedicated to the complexities of OpenGL and developing a knowledge foundation which to add the advanced concepts of lightings, NURBS, etc. Especially underdeveloped was the discussion of the various transformations and perspectives used with OpenGL. This is one of the more difficult topics of OpenGL but was not expressed well. The CD does provide lots of content, however, the examples are poorly written and documented. I ran several of the demos on a high-end PC with advanced graphic cards and loads of memory, but still saw horrible screen update and rendering times.


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