Customer Reviews

Curves and Surfaces for CAGD, Fifth Edition: A Practical Guide (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

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3 star:		(1)
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The fourth edition of this book was excellent. I'm sorry to say this one is not quite as good, as hard as that may be to believe. There are two problems: 1) a large number of errors, (worst of all) many of which are concetentrated in the chapter on b-splines. 2) in many places the book over-abstracts, and i feel that blossom form is overused here.

The first problem is quite bad: anyone who has learned the material before knows that superscript and subscript "comprehension" is required for this subject. Having a text that is full of errors in these (even if you have the errata, without which the text is near useless) erodes the ability to get the geometric intuition necessary to absorb the material.

The second problem is just that the abstractions used are sometimes more complex, and less intuitive, than the orginal form/construct/method being described. I use the blossom notation as an example: it is very useful in showing the relation between bezier and b-spline curves, but it is hardly touched on for that, despite being used constantly throughout the book. Another example: the decription of knot vectors is abstracted nearly beyond utility.

The fourth edition had almost *no* errors in it. It was very, very good. I hope there is a 6th edition that goes where this one should have!

This book should be considered as a bible for people (including students, researchers, engineers and programmers) working in the CAGD area. The author placed a good balance between the discussion of theoretical (mathematical) and practical (implementation) issues of curves and surfaces design.

I found this book to be extremely helpful in grasping the fundamentals of CAGD. The author's style is very informal and engaging (yes, despite the very 'techie' nature of the subject). The very liberally distributed illustrations give a good idea about 'whats-actually-going-on'? In all, a very highly recommended book, even if you are remotely interested in CAGD.