Rating: 
Summary: Awesome 3D Programming Book
Review: This book is easy to read and understand. This is not only the best OpenGL programming book, but the best 3D programming book I have read. The book includes the full source of a simple 3D engine. The "simple" engine successfully animates and textures Quake 2 models, has terrain capabilities, simple collision detection functions, DirectMusic, DirectSound, and DirectInput support. Unfortunately the CD that came with this book does not contain the source files, so I had to download these from the publishers web site. I hope that they start creating Direct 3D books that are this good.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, but....
Review: First off, this is a good book for someone wanting to start off in OpenGL programming. It covers the basics, gives a very good outlook on conceptualization and 3D theory, and covers the basics of matrix algrebra. Everything you need to program a game is here without bogging the user down with the inner workings of openGL's algorithms.I have to knock off a star for the CD though. The DirectX SDK included refused to install on my system and the source code samples from the book were mysteriously absent. Fortunately, you can get the SDK from Microsoft for free and the source code is available from the publishers website, but it is quite a hassle. A few of the utility programs are also shareware and require registration, which is to be expected but still aggrivating.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I've read several OpenGL books, and this one ranks with the best of them. The best thing about it, though, is that it's not just an OpenGL book, it's a game programming book, so not only will you learn OpenGL essentials, you're learn how to specifically apply them to games. The book is very easy to read and understand. It's been written in such a way that I think even someone with no experience programming games will be able to pick it up and soon be able to create a simple 3D game. In addition to the OpenGL coverage, the coverage of DirectInput and DirectSound is some of the best I've ever seen. The chapters on special effects and physics were of particular interest, as were the chapters on engine design and the final creation of a game. Whether you're just getting interested in game programming, or have been doing it for a while but don't know OpenGL, you need this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Accessible, but Sloppy and Rather Windows Specific
Review: This book covers a broad range of game programming areas, with specific sample code provided both in print and on a CD. What the book cover and abstracts fail to emphasize is that despite the "OpenGL" in the title, this is a rather Microsoft Windows specific book in many aspects. A considerable portion of it is spent talking about Windows specific APIs like DirectSound, and most of the examples use Windows event handling. It's probably hard to avoid the former issue, as there are no platform independent APIs for high quality sound, but many of the examples would not have suffered from being written using GLUT event handling. Overall, the book is written in a sensible style that may be more accessible to some readers than the "official" OpenGL manuals. However, the areas that I had independent knowledge on (Math and Physics), I noticed numerous mistakes and sloppy reasoning, which may or may not extend to the areas that I can't verify independently. Not overly valuable to me as a non-Windows programmer who has read the "official" tutorial volume, probably quite a bit more valuable to a Windows based programmer with little prior OpenGL experience.
Rating:
Summary: A few words from the author
Review: I'm pretty thick skinned, so most of the negative reviews of this book haven't bothered me. In fact, I agree with quite a few of them, and I've taken all constructive criticism into account in the writing I'm doing now. However, after the last few reviews, I feel obliged to say something. If you look at all of the reviews, you'll see that most of them are positive. In most cases, even people with well-substantiated criticism still gave the book a good rating overall. So to have 4 people in a row give the book a 1 star rating, with little more than brief, vague accusations to support them, smells to me like someone (and I'd guess it really is just one person, considering most of the reviews are anonymous) with an axe to grind. The author of a competing book, perhaps? Whoever it is should be ashamed. The reality is I think most of the people who have read this book have found it useful, if not perfect. That's the feedback I've received via email, web forums, and in person. People who have had problems with the book or the code who contacted me or Kevin will tell you we were more than happy to help them out. That said, don't buy this book. We've written another book, Beginning OpenGL Game Programming, which updates most of the material in this book, correcting things that were wrong, providing information about the additions to OpenGL that have been made in the past 3 years, and providing much more information about important topics like texturing and extensions. It's a much better value than this book, so I'd recommend looking at it instead. I've read dozens of game development and graphics books, and speaking as objectively as possible, I'd give this book 3.5 to 4 stars. But I'm ranking it 5 to offset the real fraud that has appeared in the last several reviews.
Rating: 
Summary: Fraud in its purest form...
Review: Not only am I incensed at the authors for writing such a terrible book. I would go as far to say that they should be prosecuted for literary fraud and highway robbery. I can forego the money that I spent on this book. But the hours that I pined away at trying to figure out the crap contained in the book is something that I'll never get back. I will never in my life buy another book from Astle, et al. This is the kind of writing that smells of wannabes. Please do not be taken in by these snake oil sellers.
Rating:
Summary: Fake !!!
Review: Well, this book, in it's first part is a simple poor copy of the OpenGL reference manual. The second part is simply copies from what we can get from Nehe and other OpenGL tutorials.
It's not said the authors knew what they wrote: they simply always avoid descriptions about 'hard' stuffs.
Don't buy it.
Rating:
Summary: This book is ok.
Review: If your new to open gl and know your C and arent up all night and awake. The book doesnt get bogged down and treads lightly on most topics. I hate books that write too much on topics that you just want to work and move on. At my uni this book is constantly on loan and then it went missing. So i bought it. As with most things. One book is never enough.
Rating:
Summary: Fraud in its purest form...
Review: Not only am I incensed at the authors for writing such a terrible book. I would go as far to say that they should be prosecuted for literary fraud and highway robbery. I can forego the money that I spent on this book. But the hours that I pined away at trying to figure out the crap contained in the book is something that I'll never get back. I will never in my life buy another book from Astle, et al. This is the kind of writing that smells of wannabes. Please do not be taken in by these snake oil sellers.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
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.
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