Home :: Books :: Professional & Technical  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical

Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics

Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics

List Price: $73.95
Your Price: $73.95
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 >>

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: warning: first edition
Review: First of all, I commend the authors on a timely and valuable book. However, a word of caution: this book is full of errors. Every couple of pages I am noting in the margin: did they mean A instead of B? Having encountered so many errors, I am reading every formula with scepticism. The errors are serious enough that I have trouble recommending the book without reservations, but I know of no suitable alternative. I can only hope that the errors will be weeded out of future editions.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: warning: first edition
Review: First of all, I commend the authors on a timely and valuable book. However, a word of caution: this book is full of errors. Every couple of pages I am noting in the margin: did they mean A instead of B? Having encountered so many errors, I am reading every formula with scepticism. The errors are serious enough that I have trouble recommending the book without reservations, but I know of no suitable alternative. I can only hope that the errors will be weeded out of future editions.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Way over my head
Review: I almost gave this book 2 stars but decided that punishing the authors for my stupidity wasn't fair. This book is obviously chucked full of just about every geometric formula you will ever need in computer graphics. But you had better be a darn serious mathematician! I could simply never grasp mathematics at this level. I could never look at those formulas, written in some alien heiroglyphs, and understand them enough to translate them into code. This book is one of those "Written by Professors for Professors." I bought the book because of the reviews that wrote about the code samples. Well, they are there (pseudo-code, but that is better than nothing) but nowhere near what I was expecting. My mistake was thinking it was a programming book. It's not! Bottom line, if you are looking for computer graphics formulas and understand mathematics, this book is for you. If you are a programmer and are expecting a computer graphics library of functions, look somewhere else.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Way over my head
Review: I almost gave this book 2 stars but decided that punishing the authors for my stupidity wasn't fair. This book is obviously chucked full of just about every geometric formula you will ever need in computer graphics. But you had better be a darn serious mathematician! I could simply never grasp mathematics at this level. I could never look at those formulas, written in some alien heiroglyphs, and understand them enough to translate them into code. This book is one of those "Written by Professors for Professors." I bought the book because of the reviews that wrote about the code samples. Well, they are there (pseudo-code, but that is better than nothing) but nowhere near what I was expecting. My mistake was thinking it was a programming book. It's not! Bottom line, if you are looking for computer graphics formulas and understand mathematics, this book is for you. If you are a programmer and are expecting a computer graphics library of functions, look somewhere else.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A real Treasure,
Review: I just got this book about a week ago and I haven't been able to put it down since. A great resource, a real treasure full of well presented gems. A large number of topics are well presented with mathematical depth that enables you to understand the code. The code is very well written and concise. Truly a great book and a pleasure to read. I hope to see more books like this in the future. I am interested in medical imaging applications and I know I will be using this book for a long time to come. In addition, the authors have a site ... that presents the code and additional very valuable materials.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An incredible amount of material in a single book
Review: This book provides a solid grounding in vectors and matrices, then covers a wide range of 2D and 3D geometric algorithms, such as object/object distance and intersection, boolean operations, BSP trees, convex hulls, and more. It is a comprehensive guide, giving relevant theory, methods, and working code fragments. It's an incredible value for the amount of material it covers. I think it is a must-have for computer graphics professionals (and others in related fields). In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the Foreword to this book, which I did because I was pleased with how good it is.

Visit Dave Eberly's "Magic Software" site for more about the book's contents.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It's only the first edition after all
Review: This book thinks it will be useful to computer programmers (experienced practitioners as they call them), unfortunately it is not. Apart from the numerous errors, the authors use a notation that will be unfamiliar to most programmers. The code samples are a joke (of which there are only a few). The algorithms they describe are not practical and it would take a lot more work to implement code you'd want to use in a real application based on the author's descriptions. I wish there were a geometry book that could combine theory (using a familiar notation) and practical tips and hints plus real code. I know how difficult it is to write a book and they are to be commended on the intention and scope of material they cover. It would do the community a great service if the authors could publish a second edition, taking into account some of these criticisms (As an example of a book that combines practical as well as theoretical knowledge, look at Numerical Recipes by Press et al). In its current state the book is really just a book on geometry.


<< 1 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates