OpenGL SuperBible (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Truly from Beginned to Intermediate
Review: 1173 pages of everything you need to know about how to program in Open GL and it's extensions in areas like shading. This is the third edition of this book, and like Microsoft's software, with the third release it's finally come together pretty well. It starts off with a pretty good introduction. I like that. So many computer books seem to leave out the first twenty pages that should describe just what it is that we're trying to do here.

After it says what we're trying to do, then it talks about where Open GL came from, why it came at all and where it's going. It starts simple with a program that's only about six lines of code. From there it gets as complex as you want to go.

Covers of computer books often say something like "For Beginning to Intermediate Users." It's rare that I find that this is true. Usually the books are too short to start out simple enough and then take it far enough to truly cover the intermediate lefe. This one does.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book for OpenGL
Review: I have used this book for a class taught by the author himself, Richard Wright. This is the most comprehensive book on this specific API I have ever seen.

Rating:
Summary: Dreadful for Linux
Review: I would class myself as an intermediate-level OpenGL programmer, concentrating mainly on Linux programming with nVidia hardware but also interested in Mac OS X. I bought this book because I was interested in learning about the more advanced OpenGL features: shaders, shadows and vertex buffer objects.

For my purposes, I have found this book to be shamefully poor. So bad that I am going to return it ASAP. The parts of the book which cover topics of interest to me appear to be factually incorrect and are accompanied by incorrect code. The descriptions are minimal and padded out with enormous amounts of code. The code compiles on all the machines I have tried in on but segfaults reliably at startup. Specifically, the bufferobject, occlusionquery, vertexblending and vertexshaders demos all segfault. The lowlevelshaders, highlevelshaders, bumpmapping, fragmentshaders, imageprocessing, lighting and proceduraltex demos also fail to work. I believe this is because they are not properly written and fail to make use of the available features, quitting when they discover that not all of the state-of-the-art features are available simultaneously. The only demos which do work are the trivial ones or the plagiarised ones.

Moreover, the parts of the book which cover basics are often either plagiarised verbatim or plain wrong (much better information and code can be found on the web, e.g. NeHe, and in the OpenGL Red Book). Many of the descriptions are needlessly convoluted. Many of the diagrams are huge and pointless. I suspect this is simply because the authors are way out of their depth.

I hope this review will help anyone else duped by the claim of Linux compatability. I would also caution readers interested in Mac OS X and Windows because the examples and code are likely to be misleading and are definitely not platform-independent. In the future, I would greatly appreciate more honest authors who stick to what they know.

Rating:
Summary: The absolute best book I have ever read.
Review: Simply amazing. That is the best way to describe this book. The author uses the glut library to keep cross platform compatibility but has 3 chapters dedicated to each OS (Mac OS, Linux, windows) for those who would rather use OS specific windows/input/etc handlers. As long as you have glut installed and configured correctly on your machine you should have no problem getting the examples to run. He even goes over how to install and get glut running. I my self use SDL (simple direct media layer) to keep my app cross platform compatible and had no problems what so ever porting the very small amount glut code to SDL.

I was a little worried after reading the one and only review of this book that did not get 5 stars (as of this review), but found most if not all of the complaints to be unjustified after actually reading the book. Im sure the authors are in their "depth" seeing they were part of the ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board). Yes some of the examples did not work on my laptop but that was only because my laptop did not support some of the advanced topics that required OpenGL 1.4 or better. As for being worthless for Linux, I'm having a hard time seeing how this even applies since OpenGL is a standard and has nothing to do with the OS specifically. OpenGL does not provide a window for you to draw on (that's up to the OS to provide with glut, SDL, whatever). The only problem I found with this book was one of the chapters source code was missing on the CD, but since he lays out pretty much all the source code in the book in a very clean manner along with the output of each example this was not really even a problem.

I am not what you would call a fast reader by any means but I was able to read the first 12 chapters (around 700 pages) in about 12 hours with out much previous OpenGL experience. I don't think I have ever even read a book over 300 pages before this! I found this book almost impossible to put down which is also a first for me. I think this is attributed to the fact that the author made things so clear on why things worked the way they did and how to implement them in a very straightforward way. Even chapters I thought I would not like (for example OpenGL's powerful 2d imaging) turned out to be one of the best in the book. Another great thing about this book is that everything is laid out in order. He continues to build off of previous chapters which makes it really nice that you don't have to skip all over the book looking for stuff you have not learned yet. The author does not expect you to know anything about OpenGL or 3d graphics ahead of time. He also provides after every chapter ALL the gl/glu/glut commands he uses, detail descriptions and all the possible flags/options available at the time the book was written. This makes this book the ultimate reference as well. I could go on and on about this book, but will stop here. This book was well worth every penny.

Rating:
Summary: Makes no assumptions
Review: The worst part about programming books is most of them assume that you already know everything there is to know about the subject before you begin.

This book is incredible for learning OpenGL, in one month I had gone from absolutely zero programming knowledge about OpenGL, to creating an immersive 3d environment.

I recommend this book to anybody as the absolute best resource for OpenGL.

Rating:
Summary: Best book ever committed to text
Review: This book is so comprehensive and well written, its not just a Bible...its a SUPER Bible. The authors make everything very easy to understand and the CD it comes with has some really useful goodies on it. It assumes you have a working knowledge of C/C++, but not much beyond that. It makes 3D rendering very approachable.

Rating:
Summary: Greatest addition to my library in years...
Review: This is by far the best OpenGL reference I have ever come across. I keep it on the edge of my desk for easy access. It is easy to understand and formatted in such a way that allows me to find exactly what I need to know quickly. Excellent purchase.

Rating:
Summary: concentrate on graphics development
Review: Want to make your own 3 dimensional multiplayer game, that is snazzier than Everquest or Quake? For as wide an installed base of machines as possible - Microsoft, linux and Mac? Then OpenGL may be the language of choice. By now, as attested in this text, it is very mature. It has a huge library of sophisticated routines. That let you define objects in a 3d world. And cover them in a texture map, with illumination from multiple light sources, giving specular or diffuse images. Plus much more.

The authors also dedicate specific chapters to each of those operating systems. These are basically tweaks to OpenGL to optimise; related to the native graphics packages. But, and you should be thankful for this, most of the book relates to OpenGL operations common over all platforms. What the book shows is that you can code most or all of your application and ignore the underlying operating system. Much like writing in high level language like Java. So you can concentrate on your graphics skills. Which is your core competence, right?