Product Description

Discusses the basics of using OpenGL to create computer games that have realistic graphics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #324636 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

Worth reading
This book is great for beginners provided you have a basic knowledge of programming. I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in trying opengl. The cd also contains great extra chapters on maths and some directx.

It's a good primer that gets you on the move...
I checked up on the many available OpenGL books before purchasing this. I wanted to do my OpenGL in Delphi and there's, obviously, a dearth of books for OpenGL with this language. However, don't let that daunt you - I have found that this book is very helpful in explaining concepts and getting you to understand "what" you're doing and "why" in OpenGL - the "how" will be ever so slightly different in a language that is not C++, but you'll have the hand-holding the book provides to get you through it... after all, OpenGL is a standard and the actual OpenGL bits are the same in any language.

The first chapter is a bit of waste - going on about why people program things like games, and setting up your window (totally Windows C++) to show your first OpenGL scene... I have found the following chapters very enlightening though... the explanation of states and primitives is good, likewise the chapeter on perspective and orthographic projections was helpful to me... camera movement too. Transformations was already in my head and likewise textures and displaying of text. I'm only using quick and dirty default lighting in OpenGL at the moment so I look forward to the chapter on lighting and also fog. All in all - a good enough buy for me to get value out of it.

A solid introduction
This is a very good introductory book to OpenGL. I purchased this book because I wanted an insight into how OpenGL works and possibly to be able to produce something of my own. At the moment it's slow progress as I found that there is a lot to take in with OpenGL and a lot of it isn't very concrete until you actually sit down and code it yourself.

The authors also expect you to have knowledge and prior experience with C/C++ and this is indeed a prerequisite to reading the book so please don't get this book if you have no experience with the aforementioned languages as you will struggle. Aside from the above points the book is a solid introduction and is written well, the CD with all of the source code on is very useful too.