Customer Reviews

OpenGL Programming for Windows 95 and Windows NT

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I was hoping this book would help with a project I was working on. Unfortunately it was vague and had no real depth. In the end I bought Mark Kilgard's excellent book on X Windows and translated his excellent descriptions and code examples into the equivalent wgl functions. I also bought OpenGL Superbible which is better than this for wgl functions.

The "reader from Princeton, NJ" hit it on the head when he called this book "Horrifyingly Undercooked". DO NOT try to read the sections on understanding translations and rotations, the author is a klutz at explaining it - just use the "Red Book".

The only thing I got out of the book was to take one of the early simple sample programs to start a framework for building my Windows-based application(a flight simulator). The OpenGL SuperBible is much better, wish I would have known about it first.

I cannot express how bad this book is. In all fairness, I only got through half the book, but that's because if I continued, I would have wasted my time and tried my patience. This book is incomprehensible, convoluted, and just plain horrible.

The major problem is that this books gets worse and worse by each chapter. This is because a chapter requires that you know what happened in the previous chapter. Since this book starts off pretty bad, it gradually turns into a foreign language by chapter 7.

Another problem is that the author also has no fluidity. Compound this with the fact that this book is technical book, it makes reading one page a major chore.

Finally, the examples are just plain bad. First, it requires the reader to be very familiar with Visual C++. That's not all bad, but the examples presented rely on information that was badly presented, hardly presented, or not presented yet. Also, the examples' explanations barely explain what the code does.

If you're like me, a programmer that was curious about OpenGL, avoid this book. It's needless to say that my interest in OpenGL dwindled to nothing after trying to read this.

If you like your code wrapped in C++ classes then this might be your book. For those who prefer to learn the API and have more control, get something else. This book tries to look like the official book for programming OpenGL under MS Windows. But don't let that fool you.
If you want to do OpenGL and at the same time understand what's going on, then get the "red book"(ISBN 0201604582). Also get a windows specific OpenGL book like the OpenGL SuperBible (Highly recommended).

It is really old and outdated. Even if it can be used to get a basic knowledge of OpenGL programing in Windows environment it does allow a complete understand of the argument. Moreover, the sources of the examples shown into the book, which should be available to be downloaded from the Web, are missing.
If you need such kind of book a better choice is "OpenGL Superbible - 3rd Edition".

The strength of this book is that it contains code (in CD) that you can use rihgt away to develop openGL program in Visual C++ environment. The weak part is that it does not teach you well--some topics are presented in very confusing ways. You would not learn much openGL from this book.

Good topic. Very, very bad writing, simply unreadable at times. A lot of technical errors--some of which are ridiculous (like the divination about the Windows somehow requiring that windows procs be called "WinProc" (!)) I mean, if you don't know something, why not keep quiet about it? Why is it necessary to make a fool of yourself? And finally--the book isn't even proof-read--there are missing chunks right on the first page. It's a shame, because the topic is worthy--mainly due to the fact that the "Blue" and the "Red" books (which, unlike this one, are rather well done) are unix-based. Generally, OpenGL is platform-independent, but one part of it is OS-specific--the "glue" that maps the mathematics into the rendering operations. So, a book covering such for Windows platform would be rather useful. Even if the book is proof-read and improved otherwise, it's not sufficient by itself. In fact, you'd do well by starting with the "Blue" one, and then going on to Fosner's "works" for Windows-specific details. Hopefully they'll fix it in the second edition (not that I know anything about such work being in progress.) The way the book is now--it has to be ignored, plain and simple. Not a good work.

This book is heavily biased towards MS products, MS VC++ in particular. The author uses MFC throughout almost the whole book, which is either a big plus or a big minus, but at least he gives reasons why you are doing what you are doing before writing the C++ code. Good explanation of pixel formats and why they are important. Could use more in the way of examples, but you end up with a nice MFC view class that's easy to drop into your projects. Assumes that you know little about OpenGL, but are familiar with C++ and MFC. Could have been longer. The last chapter on hardware and optimization is nice.

Buy the book if you want to know how NOT to design a C++ OpenGL classes for Windows. The book makes a big (and common) mistake of integrating OpenGL rendering context management into CView derived object, as if OpenGL could render to CView window only! You cant find very important Windows specific issues in the book, like rendering to DIB section and using it to integrate OpenGL rendering with Windows and GDI. Full screen rendering issues are also not covered. You also won't find any WindowsNT specific issues (like rendering to enhanced metafile).

I found the book useful and practically the only book that shows how to use OpenGL with MFC and the Visual C++ programming environment. If you're interested in SDK c style code this is not the book for you. If you're interested in C++ and MFC this book is highly recommended. The book could use additional topics such as printer & memory DC support, however, overall it's a great introduction.