Customer Reviews

Beginning OpenGL Game Programming, Second Edition

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was extremely excited about this book. I was around when NeHe first started up but was working exculsively on DirectX. That website was such a resource it was amazing. I bought their book wihtout question and started working with it and reading it.
First problem was the source on the CD. The project settings are messed up so you have to rebuild the projects. Not a huge deal but kind of annoying. This stuff happens. A quicker fix is to go to: http://www.courseptr.com/ and search for the book - downloads. Then you're good.

The Positive:
They go into all the stuff you need to know about general openGL and they cover what's being removed and added in the new openGL model. This is very helpful and guides you on what you should use in your applicaitons so you have an easy transition to gl 3.1. They also cover things like text, and GLSL.

The Negative:
I am amazed that they call this a "Game Development" book. It's a shorter GL reference book and thats it. They show some terrain generation and that's about as far into *game* development you get. If you need a very complete GL reference you're probably better off witht he openGL "Redbook". If you know some GL and just want a simple reference then this is better since it's shorter.

The VERY Negative:
After reading this book for awhile I was blown away and pretty mad I even bought it. The guys from NeHe have always been good and writing solid tutorials and complete examples. The book simply says, "Here are the functions you need to call, here is how you use them, go look at the source code." And when they do show pieces of examples they are using varaibles that are not declared ahead of time so you have no idea what they are, they call functions and other pieces of code that are not explained and bottom line, there isn't ONE complete example in this book.

How in the world did the guys from NeHe go down this path? This is an awful book unless you just want the bare minimum functions listed to you. If you want working examples you can build up you must go to the CD. I travel a lot and use the flights and driving/riding time to read and keep up in the graphcis world. This book is practically useless in that context. I say go online, read tutorials and find examples to teach you whats new in gl 3.0 OR if you are interested in game development, find a GL book that teaches this.

I bought this book because I'm getting more and more involved with computer graphics programming and I was interested in digging in something lower-level like OpenGL. I am no professional programmer, just hobbyist, I know python fairly well now and am just beginning to put my fingers into C++.

So, what I wanted was basically understand how OpenGL works, be able to follow with my limited C++ knowledge and also get a couple of yummy and well organized pieces of code to explore. This book fullfilled those 3 topics perfectly.

Some of the critics the others reviewers made may be true, for ex. that the example code doesn't correspond exactly to the examples in the book, but I didn't find that a bad thing, I saw the code more like "real-life" examples to explore, practice & tweak after you learned some theory in the book.

My very small knowledge of the C++ language didn't give me too much problem, the book focuses on explaining how you do things the opengl way and not on building working programs. For example it says things like "In OpenGL, this is how you must build a triangle: you first build an array with the vertices coordinates, then pass it that way". I had a bit of difficulty understanding a couple of specific programming topics at the beginning of the book, but the author himself doesn't extend much on those parts.

So I think you must not consider this book as a practical manual for building games, but rather a theory book about openGL, but a theory book made with a quite practical approach. It doesn't talk much about 3D geometry itself, but focuses on making you understand "the OpenGL way", with small tricks, examples, and the well-known experience of the NeHe people. If you already know a bit of spatial geometry (how 3D coordinates work, how vectors work, etc), it will help you greatly.

After reading the book my idea about OpenGL is that it is really, a bare, salty and undigest piece to eat. Everything must be done a certain way, not another and it is sometimes very counter-instinctive. But I also realized that OpenGL is the true foundation behind almost any other higher-level application, library, method, game or anything else realted to 3D that I have encountered. Things I encountered in some games, in Coin3D or in Blender suddenly make sense. I knew how you apply a texture on an object with your favorite 3D app already, but I know now how it works internally, and I have a good idea on how I could write a shader myself to overwrite the standard way...

So I enjoyed much this book, and probably will come back to it often as time passes.

I bought this book to help towards my understanding of OpenGL for college. And in my experience, this book is ok, but not that great.

Pros:
- The book explains most of what you need to know about about OpenGL functions, data types, etc.
- It's one of the few books out there that actually has you build something like a game at the end of the book.

Cons:
- Code on the CD is different from what's in the book. A lot of the different code is explained through very vague, 1 sentence comments. Stuff that's not even mentioned in the book.
- This is another "teach you about this subject" books, instead of the preferred "follow along and learn" books. What I mean by this is they will tell you how to make changes, but not where to put the code and in what file. It's up to you to either guess, or go through the different source code to try and figure it out.

Overall, I'd give it a 3/5. It explains OpenGL well, but don't count on the source code to help you. It will just confuse you more.

I have coded in C++ for a year now, and have written some good stuff and have all the pre-requisites the book asks. I have good 3D Math skills to boot. However, I thought I ought to look into graphics and I do like a good book. The beginning chapter explains things well enough and seems to be building up to something. But then it hits you...... You cant open the source files. Or rather I could not open the code blocks source, apparently the file does not exist.

I really wanted this book to be great, but when you make a transition to something like OpenGL I think things need to be explained a bit more carefully. And of course have code that you can see. I literally thought it would be a case of finding the code blocks source file and opening it. Not so. I have VS C++ 2010 but no help here either. In the SRC directory I can see the source, but thats it.

I am still endeavouring to get things right, but I this has made it hard work. The shame of it is it seems like the authors have a really lucid and enticing style, but ultimately its just sloppily put together.

The exception is that if you don't know much about C or C++ already, or don't have the requisite math knowledge, this book may be kind of hard for you.

I am taking a openGL class right now and have found this book a very good supplement to my teachers lectures.

As an former 2D programmer hobbist, I found a hard time moving to a 3D space. I tried other OpenGL books, but, this book was the first book that was able to kept me interested (and motivated in learning) to the end. The source code is well written in C++, well documented and it is easy to follow (even when the code is non-trivial, like heightmaps, lights and normals, etc) providing basic and usefull classes. The complete source code, textures, shaders are contained in a CD wich comes along with the book.
My personal objective was to learn how computer graphics work, in order to be able to understand more complex 3D APIs and tools, and it was fullfilled by this book.
This book also shows how to create code that runs the same way in different machines (time-based rendering, instead of frame-based rendering).

Note: On Visual C++ Express 2010, when I opened/converted the solutions from the CD, I had to remove the other two referenced projects (I think they were created by CMake) and adjust the path for the source files (they referenced an absolute path, different than my project's path). Besides that, everything worked as a charm, even better than expected.

The source code works perfectly for both Windows and Linux (I still don't have a Mac nearby for testing).

The source code that came with the book just flat out doesn't work. You can open the projects, but you can't open the source. I went to the publishers website and downloaded the fix. The project files don't work either, but you can at least see the source code in the src directory now.

Bad/broken source isn't uncommon and though annoying, isn't a big deal. But the total lack of support shown for this book is amazing. Most authors have a website for their books. This guy has a picture of the book and a table of contents and nothing else. The publisher gives a link to an offsite download for the fix, that doesn't 'fix' anything. They leave you with no where to turn and a book that refers to source that you have no chance in hell in getting to work without already knowing what you need to learn.

I'd give it a negative star if I could, it was a complete waste of money. Given time, I've no doubt you can get the source to work, there's plenty of opengl sites to fill in the gaps. However, I bought the book so I wouldn't have to go to these sites. Save yourself some money and go to these sites or find another beginners book.

This book is horrible. The code is outdated and most of the time it doesn't work. I had to buy it for a class and it was a nightmare. If you want to learn openGL your better off searching the web. I would write more, but I don;t want to waist anymore time on this book that I already have.