Customer Reviews

Opengl Superbible: The Complete Guide to Opengl Programming for Windows Nt and Windows 95

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

 

 

This book is great for beginners or intermediate programmers just getting started with opengl and programming. I had little experience with opengl or c++ in general, but was able to understand the examples and write some very useful code that I use in my programs. The opengl stuff is now the easiest part.

I have had great difficulty trying to get the example programs to run. Code snippets are missing include files, some code produces errors that I cannot resolve. Very frustrating.

This book covers a LOT of OpenGL material. The first 3 chapters of the book are great, with a few exceptions. He doesn't explicitely state that you must link OpenGL32.lib and Glaux.lib to your application before you're able to use those libraries in your app. - 1 star! By the 4th chapter, the reader (or at least I was) ready to jump into 3d programming. However, by the 4th chapter, I became discouraged because the author suddenly assumes that you have entry-level windows progamming! I didn't... thus, that's as far in the book I got. Why did I still give it 3 stars? Because it deserves it! It covers a lot of material, and if you already have some experience in windows programming, I'd rate this book higher (to a 4). This is a great book- if you know windows programming to a certain (basic) extent.

I found this book dropped off precipitously in substantive content after the first few chapters. It is adequate for a novice but quickly became inadequate when trying to obtain a deeper understanding of OpenGL. Agree with reviewer who said title should be different, and to some extent, share the "UGH" reviewer's sentiments.

Im very happy with this book,its great!. If you want to learn OpenGL for Win32 Get It!!!.

The back cover of this book promises to teach you how to "command the magic of OpenGL, the 3D graphics API that entertainment industry wizards use to create special effects such as the dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park' and the liquid-metal terminator in 'Terminator 2.'" The front cover promises that the book contains "Everything you need to know about Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL." This book falls short on both counts.

This book does very little to teach the reader about anything other than the most ordinary uses for OpenGL. Pages are devoted to issues such as 2D raster graphics, stipple patterns, and the wave/particle theory of light. (Do we really need to know this to use OpenGL? NO!) More important concepts, such as texture mapping, shadows, and alpha buffer effects are glossed over as if the reader was expected to already know them.

The poor coverage of important topics is complemented by poor coverage of important function calls. Many very useful function calls are not explained at all and in some cases the descriptions are erroneous. Also, the authors have written their own subroutines which are called from the sample programs but not explained anywhere in the text, leaving the reader wondering what magic must be performed by this hidden code.

To make matters worse, many of the illustrations in the book are black and white pictures of the color output of the sample programs. The resulting low-contrast images make it hard to figure out what point is being made by the illustrations.

The authors make an attempt to teach the reader the principles of 3D computer graphics, but fall short on this point also. Although I have some experience in 3D graphics, I often found myself confused by the author's explanation of things such as transformation matrices and NURBS.

The one redeeming aspect of this book are the explanations of function calls at the end of each chapter. But unfortunately, many function calls used by the sample programs are omitted, and the ones that are included are often not explained very well. Better documentation of these functions can be downloaded free from the World Wide Web. For the price of this book, you'd expect something better than what Silicon Graphics gives away for free.

The book also appears to cover only OpenGL 1.0. Important new OpenGL 1.1 functions aren't mentioned in the text.

This book may have some value (but very little) for absolute beginners, but anyone wishing to do serious work with OpenGL would do better to avoid this book. If you are truly interested in 3D graphics, I'd recommend Foley & van Dam's excellent "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice" combined with one of the SGI OpenGL references.

I bought the book as an amerature to the OpenGL API. This book helped me to learn OpenGL as well as integrate it with Windows 32 bit applications. The book was very simple to use. The CD that comes with it is very helpful for looking at example code. This book is worth getting if you are serious about writing graphics programs in Windows.

I purchased this book, along with another OpenGL book, when I started learning OpenGL. Since then I've started working on a full 3D engine. This good has been what I needed every step of the way. Not only does it give you everything you need to know about OpenGL, but it also explains in detail, why and how things work. This book rocks.

Its not as bad as some of the reviews above let you believe. I myself came from a Direct3D background and needed to know about openGL for some projects at work. It doesn't cover any of the mathematics of 3D programming as some of the above articles complain - but there is no way you will please everyone. The book is not a superbible. It has a reasonable reference manual and is easily readable and explains its subject well. Personally I would like to have seen a bit more on hardware acceleration (being a superbible and all that). I am happy with the book, and if you're in a similar situation to mine - go for it. The CD is crap I am afraid to say. It does have the source-code of all the examples and some standard stuff of the openGL people. It is worth mentioning that the book treats Borland/Inprise compilers with respect and provides support even for Delphi (in the form of an OCX). Hope this is of some help.

Throughout this book, I found many useful tips, however, I was very unsatisfy with the fact that this book did not mention anything about GLUT. I found using GLUT and GL was much more easier than using the glaux. For example, how to link GLUT lib to Borland C++? Everyone know how to link with Mics. Visual C++. I found this book is rather out of date.

P.S. Please, if anyone know how to link Borland C++ 5.0 with GLUT, please let me know, I would appreciate it.