Customer Reviews

Guide to Graphics Software Tools

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Not only are his language skills extremely lacking, but his coding is sloppy and his teaching leaves MUCH to be desired. Don't think I'm just a disgruntled student who wants revenge on the professor, because I got an A- for the course and I slept through it. The book really is not all that good. The majority of the book itself is references to other resources. What's left is only four chapters that do not delve very deep into any of the concepts that they supposedly cover. It is not worth it to get this book.

This book will not teach you computer graphics techniques, nor will it teach you OpenGL. What it mainly provides is an index of products -both free and commercial - that can be of use to people who already understand computer graphics programming and OpenGL. What's worse, the book is really very tied to its date of publication, and by now many of the websites mentioned in the book are dead links. Also, technology has outgrown or started to outgrow many of the graphics tools mentioned. For example, there is a section on virtual reality that talks a great deal about Open Inventor and VRML as though they are current tools when in fact technologies such as X3D and MPEG4 have largely replaced them. The table of contents are:

PART 1- A Shortcut to Computer Graphics Principles

Objects and Models

Transformation and Viewing

Color and Lighting

Blending and Texture Mapping

Advanced Topics

Part 2- Computer Graphics Software Tools

Low-Level Graphics Libraries

Visualization

Modeling and Rendering

Animation and Simulation

Virtual Reality

Web3D Tools and Networked Environment

3-D File Formats

APPENDIX: List & description of Graphics Software Tools

As you can see from the listing of the table of contents above, only the first five chapters comprising part one of the book has anything to do with graphics programming techniques, and it is so brief and disjointed as to be useless. Part two is about software tools for a variety of subjects, and this is the part that has really become outdated, as I mentioned before. In particular, the chapter on 3D file formats is particularly useless, as it does not give you enough information about any particular 3D file format to be helpful at all. Also, the stuff on virtual reality and Web3D is just plain incomprehensible to a novice and of no use to anyone who already knows something about these subjects. In short, avoid this book because it succeeds at nothing.

In addition to his lack of mastery of the English Language, the author seems to lack the organizational skill to put useful information together in a useful way. I flipped through this outdated book at the library and I discovered that I could find better information by doing ten minutes of Google searching. As said in a previous review, the book contains a lot of references to outdated technology and contains little information about the fundamental concepts of graphics programming. This is a terrible book, If you can, go to a college library and look through it before buying, I am sure you will decide not to.

It is my long time desire to find a better graphics software to visualize my research project. However, because of overstuffed schedule of daily life, I have to keep using the tool I have been using to meet the deadline.
In this holiday season, I picked this book and I think I found a shortcut to the place where I can get an up-to-date overview for the numerous graphics tools. This book provides a concise description to computer graphics principles, which help readers to better understand the graphics tool. More valuable to me, this book summarizes 266 graphics software tools by application category. Now I am sure I got a better view for the graphics tools in the current world and I know where I can find them. This book will be an excellent reference book on my desk.