Customer Reviews

OpenGL: A Primer (2nd Edition)

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

 

 

I bought this book recently as a supplement to a computer graphics class that I am currently taking at Ohio State University. While this book is not an in-depth coverage of OpenGL or computer graphics, it does provide clear and concise explanations of OpenGL and GLUT functions necessary for the novice. I found it to be well organized and full of useful examples of code.

The author states that it is meant as a companion book to his textbook on OpenGL. It is easy to see that this is the case, in that certain expectations exist in order to fully appreciate the book. For example, the book does not cover the transformation matrices which form the bases for the transformation functions. It glosses over the coordinate transformations as well. In order to focus on how to achieve a desired effect the Primer concerns itself more with demonstating different functions and their effects rather than explaining how the functions achieve the things they do.

Still, I bought the book knowing this was the case. It is an excellent companion to a more thorough text. I am using Hill's Computer Graphics Using OpenGL, Second Edition.

Naturally, for a complete guide to OpenGL, I recommend the Red Book, OpenGL Programming Guide currently in it's Third Edition.

I am a programmer who needs to implement some graphics in an application. Nothing really serious, but beyond the functions of Win32 API. So naturally I turned to OpenGL, but at first a was little turned off by its complexity (well, so I thought).
I ended up buying this book, and also the "red book" (OpenGL Programming Guide). OpenGL Primer is a great book to get a general overview and fast hands on experience. I was amazed how easy it actually is to get a basic OpenGL program up and running. When I am interested in more in depth knowledge on a subject, I turn to the red book.
Again I can recommend this to every beginner on this subject. Although on the cover it states "for programmers with background in computer graphics", I can say its easy to understand even if you have next to no prior knowledge, like me.
enjoy.

This book doesn't intend to be a full, in-depth OpenGL manual. It gears itself toward providing a dense, mid-level overview of a complex graphics API. The problem with this book is that it is filled with buggy example code. Considering the fact that the reader of this book will not be an experienced OpenGL developer, it's difficult to go through code line-by-line and find the careless type-o or other error. For some reason, this is a fairly common problem in many programming books (O'Reilly books being an exception). Why the publishers don't make sure the sample code compiles before they print a book, is beyond me.

While this book does have a decent number of code samples (though it could certainly use both more samples and more detailed samples), the book seems to just be a rehash of the well-known OpenGL red book (OpenGL Programming Guide). I've been reading them simultaneously, and I've yet to find anything of use in Angel's book that is not in the red book. So, do yourself a favor and don't waste the time/money reading this book--your time would be better spent delving further into the code samples and online resources associated with the OpenGL Programming Guide.

This book is a great little reference book to get started in using openGL. Its small size keeps it as a handy reference beside the keyboard. The function calls are placed in their own highlighted boxes complete with descriptions, to make looking up syntax less painful.

The choice to use GLUT for the windows system is excellent since it allows programs to run fairly consistent on Windows, Linux, and Mac. It also grealy simplifies the code examples and allows focus onto the important openGL calls.

For serious development, learning a more sophisticated windowing API is neccessary, but to master the fundamentals of openGL, this book will get you there.

Has too much of a pedantic and formal tone to be helpful to someone who really wants to dig in and write code. OpenGL has gone through a lot of growth, and I was hoping to find something that would zero in on modern OpenGL. This book did not meet that need. You'll still need the OpenGL Red Book, and this primer will not make it any easier to do that, nor will it tell you which parts of the Red Book can be safely ignored. I'd like to see more practical programming advice and less of a formal treatment of the theory.

I am taking a Computer Graphics 3D class at a Dutch University, and this book is part of our teaching method.

The book is a great intro on OpenGL (with a lot of C++ examples).
It's a perfect start for beginners in 3D graphics. You'll get an basic understanding of all aspects of OpenGL and its capabilities.
Along with the Redbook (free online OpenGL documentation) you should be able to learn OpenGL quickly in a matter of weeks.

This book provides a very good introduction to programming in OpenGL. However it might help to have some theoretical background in computer graphics for some of the concepts. I read it in conjunction with a computer graphics course and it was very useful and complementary to what was covered in that course.

However I also found a lot of typos and bugs in this book. They may have been fixed in the second edition but were very annoying. I almost feel like they added these typos/bugs in on purpose to challenge the reader.

The book is good, it's written in simple english.

Then I guess you better wake him up! That's right, I hope you like using the GLUT (Graphics Library Utility Toolkit) because that's all Angel uses here. Sure, the GLUT is great if you just want to display a spinning triangle or create the most basic program, but if you want to create an OpenGL project with some bite then you should pick up another book which will teach you Qt or Windows programming. If you're a n00b, opengl will render all of your shapes and colors, but it can't create its own window to run in. The GLUT is one way to create an "opengl window," but the GLUT is by all means the most basic and useless of the possible methods. Yes, I realize this is a "primer," but for 30+ dollars, you can do better. Much, much better. Besides nothing in this book isn't something you couldn't find in a pdf file on opengl.org.