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Foundations of 3D Graphics Programming: Using JOGL and Java3D

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This book is really a disappointment. In trying to get information on 3D graphics, JOGL, and Java3D all into one 300 page book, the authors have sacrificed vital information on all three topics. What you end up with is a condensed survey of "how to" formulas on pretty simple graphic tasks implemented in JOGL and Java3D, with no idea of the math and algorithms behind them and no real idea of the correct structure of programs written in Java3D or JOGL. Even the exercises are jokes, with some actually consisting of "match a function call in this list to an action in another list". The book is pretty good at describing beginner tasks such as installation details for JOGL and Java3D, but it is definitely downhill from there.

If you want to know about Java3D and JOGL, the best sources are on the web written by individuals that have wrestled with the details and documented them for the rest of us. For computer graphics beginners, I recommend "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" by Peter Shirley. For a more advanced book on the subject try "3D Computer Graphics" by Alan Watt. Both of these books are non API-specific tutorials, which is what you need to get started. Since these books are rather expensive, a poor man's alternative is the Schaum's Outline on Computer Graphics, which is also non API-specific and quite good considering the low cost. For OpenGL, the latest edition of the "OpenGL Programming Guide" is essential. After all, JOGL is just a Java binding to OpenGL.

I know it is tempting for scientists and engineers who need to do computer graphics programming as part of their job to believe the authors' claim that this book is a shortcut to learning the essentials of this broad subject, but let me assure you there is no such thing.

I was on the waiting list to buy this book before it was released. I was expecting some good intermediate information on JOGL that was along the lines of implementation and Graphics architecture concepts. Boy was I dissapointed. This is a survey of OPENGL not particularly JOGL. This is the kind of book a professor would assign a freshmen programmer to read. They went to far into the details of the matrix mathematics behind the graphics library instead of practical implementation. Dont get me wrong knowing how things work is a must but dont sell yourself as anything more than a survey of graphics programming.

This book is of no avail to a student of computer graphics. Not only are the explanations in this book sorely incomplete, they are so poorly written that they require hours of careful examination to determine that they are incomplete. All throughout the book the author leads you on by making you think that you are about to be told something useful. You never are. Additionally, the code given in the book will often not compile or fail to execute properly. You will be very disappointed if you buy this book.

This book was theoretically written to be a introduction to OpenGL using the cross platform JOGL bindings. It fails to accomplish this task by providing incomplete instructions to get JOGL working, and extremely confusing convoluted example code. I am a professional computer programmer, and rarely have I come across such bad code. Furthermore, the algorithms discussed in this book are explained by confusing code rather than in words. To top it off, the author(s) must not be fluent in English. I had to read many sentences over several times in order to understand the poor English.

I had expected more focus on the word "Foundations", but the brief introduction to output primitives was sorely lacking. For instance, they cover, in detail, the Bresenham line-drawing algorithm, but they completely ignore the midpoint-circle drawing algorithm; it would have been nice to see a Java implementation of this.

I was also disappointed that all of the code in the book is subclassed off of any previous code. This is OK in the first couple of examples, but, when one goes further through the text, it becomes difficult to determine just what methods they are calling in their code, and where they come from.

So, in short, the book should not be used as one's sole introduction to the fundamentals of graphics programming, but it might serve as a good counterpart to learn some Java-specific implementations.