47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Skip this book., March 30, 2007
This review is from: Pro OGRE 3D Programming (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Hardcover)
While this text represents what amounts to a noble effort on behalf of the author and the Ogre community, I'm afraid that the best I can say for this book is that it's not entirely terrible. Hoping to fast-forward past the traditionally hackish explanations offered by online documentation, I had purchased this book expecting to learn about Ogre in a more carefully structured and comprehensive (not to mention, professional) manner. Unfortunately, this was simply not to be.
The examples in this book... suck. They're terrible. Everything is simply copied (often incorrectly!) from the freely available Ogre samples. What's more, any explanation of this code is purely cursory, often suggesting that the reader "Check the website for more details," which are apparently too involved or lengthy for inclusion in this $35 hardcover text on Ogre. Oops.
Perhaps I've been spoiled by the OpenGL programming guide. For one reason or another, I've come to expect concise examples that illustrate a single idea presented with plenty of discussion on how this idea might be used in practice and some exposition as to what features exist to allow one to best do so. Compared to this expectation, what this book manages to give you is a tiny sampling of a semi-relevant example drawn from the SDK's sample projects, partnered with the name of the classes and member functions involved in said example all laid out in a nice monospace font, and that's about the sum of it (give or take one or two sentences of description-- sometimes). For instance, while one whole page is dedicated to a laundry-list of the Camera's member functions (clearly copied wholesale from the header file with minimal corrections), maybe three or four functions for interacting with the scene graph are *shown* (not presented) in the context of-- you guessed it-- a small subset of some Ogre sample project. This and some sample code showing how to query the scene in one or two ways is basically all you get from the ~30 page chapter dedicated to the subject.
Often times, the author spends pages upon pages singing praise to a particular feature of Ogre (render queues, techniques, LOD, schemes...), proceeding thereupon to omit any sort of actual explanation of how this feature is used later in the text. As you might imagine, this habit becomes quite annoying by the third or fourth time it occurs. Worse, still, is that any discussion that *is* presented by the author often culminates in a lacking, vague, and ambiguous description that ultimately fails to convey any sense of "The Big Picture." For one reason or another, the author seems convinced that a six line code snippet from the SDK is sufficient to explain just about everything there is to know about, say, Materials or SceneManager instances. And in the end, you feel *almost* as inexperienced with this library as you did when you originally set out to learn Ogre. Of course, by the time you've finished this book, you'll also have learned the valuable lesson that the website is really quite good-- but I'd bet that's not exactly the lesson you were planning to take from this book when you plunked down your money for it in the first place.
One final criticism: be warned! When this book first arrived, I was quite surprised to discover just how thin it was. Before you assume that it's because this book is concise and to-the-point also note that the print is TINY. It's a real pain that the publisher decided to cut corners and use a 10 point font to cut down on page count all the while selling this text as a clunky hardcover book! This, coupled with the numerous typos, bugs, and inconsistencies make for a very unprofessional read. If this were a freely available tutorial you could find somewhere on the website, I'd give it 4 stars. But this is a pricey, hardcover book that's supposed to be professionally edited, organized, and polished; hence, it gets 2 stars.
Okay, okay. This book isn't entirely bad. It's always nice when an open source project becomes big enough to warrant a book. And I'm sure that the author had fine intentions when setting out to write this text: some of the chapters do manage a decent description of their subject matter, and the author's enthusiasm for Ogre is quite evident in his writing (which can be amusing, at times). Unfortunately, however, this book is just not there yet: it is a thorough sales pitch, a high-level tutorial, and many suggestions to visit the website; expect nothing more.
My suggestion? Take his advice, and save some money. Visit the website and skip this book.
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58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
How could this have been published?, April 21, 2007
This review is from: Pro OGRE 3D Programming (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Hardcover)
Spending all day reading and implementing obscure APIs, you tend to develop thick skin for badly written documentation. Programmers generally don't have english degrees. You suffer through and glean the information you need to get your job done.
I'll cut to the chase on this review. This book contains NO information. That's right, it tells you nothing about how to use Ogre. The author spends the first quarter of the book on downloading, installing, and calling the init function (which takes up to three arguments).
Halfway through the book I started thinking "He's actually going to put and object in a scene any minute now". Nope, it never happens. After spending a hundred pages talking about how great Ogre is and the four types of objects he skips over actually using any of the objects. The book doesn't even cover the object trees. It flops back and forth between halfway done remedial 3D concepts (What is a camera? I'll tell you in chapter 7) and marketing speek (Ogre has a great plugin archtitecture you should love only I won't tell you how to use it).
I'm still in awe that something this free of actual content could be published. After reading the entire book, I still had no idea how to perform basic functions in Ogre like loading a texture.
This book has no audience. It doesn't really cover any basic 3D concepts so it's bad for beginners. It doesn't cover how to use the APIs so it's bad for a bootstrap reference, and it doesn't cover any core logic so it's bad for advanced developers. No one should ever buy this book.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not so 'PRO'..., September 8, 2009
This review is from: Pro OGRE 3D Programming (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Hardcover)
I bought the book because of urgent need to use the Ogre3D engine.
Some remarks:
1. Hardcover? why? You make a hardcover for a 'bible' programming book (like a C++ bible book) that will serve you as a reference for as long as you need to use its contents.This book is NOT a 'bible' book (or a reference book). A hardcover is for making books last longer. Under this idea they made a book that covers a 3D engine's CURRENT release(!!!). So if something drastically changes in the next major release, will they print another one? Hardcover again?
2. The 'PRO' in the title is misleading. Don't consider this book as having extensive information about all aspects of the engine. Thing of the 'PRO' more like your knowledge prerequisites in aspects as C++, CG scripts, 3D modeling and 3D texturing. It is in fact the wiki of Ogre3D in a hardcover (and maybe less)... Yet it is some times more helpful to have a book around instead of searching the net.(and it's a Hardcover so its cool!! nah... bad joke.. )
3. The book does seem to jump around from topic to topic but if you have gained enough knowledge of the object before reading it, you will get a better perspective view of the engine and how its elements are connected with each other. That's why it says 'PRO'!! ;-)
Definitely NOT a good buy for a beginner.
Notice: is used the world 'bible' metaphorically, to describe a book that contains almost everything about a specific topic. Please do not confuse it's use with it's religious meaning. Thank you.
Another thing, I'm NOT a 'PRO' so I didn't gained much from this book either. But i believe that eventually it will come in handy.
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