Customer Reviews

Schaum's Outline of Computer Graphics

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Two things that you'll likely find in most computer graphics textbooks are:
1. A triple digit price tag
2. Disorganized and obfuscated algorithm details
This Schaum's outline is an excellent antidote to both of these problems. Besides its low price tag, it has a very clear presentation of the basics of computer graphics algorithms. It starts out talking about image representation including common color spaces. It gives a clear definition of dithering, halftone approximations, and error diffusion. Next comes a discussion of scan conversion, which is how to translate geometric figures into pixels. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss two-dimensional graphics and their transformations. This includes good discussions and examples on matrix transformations and how they can be chained together. Chapters 6 through 8 extend these concepts to three dimensions. Very detailed information is given on transformations, projections, and clipping in 3D. This includes a definition of a typical 3D graphics "pipeline", which is basically an assembly-line of computer graphics from object definition to display. Chapter 9 on geometric representations was not as good as the other chapters in this outline, since it didn't do a very good job of talking about such representations in greater than two dimensions which is necessary for the development of wireframe models. However, the last three chapters of the book on hidden surfaces, shading models, and ray tracing had very good examples and discussions that could lead to pseudocode. I would highly recommend this guide to anyone taking or planning to take a course on computer graphics as a good language-independent guide to the basic methods and algorithms of computer graphics programming.

This book is a very handy guide to have while you are studying computer graphics. It explains a wide variety of topics in the field computer graphics as well as the math that is involved. However, this book is all concepts and math. You will not find much code in here, but rather a good review of the theory behind elementry computer graphics. I recommend this book to those taking an undergraduate course in computer graphics.

This excellent book enabled me to design my first graphics pipeline from scratch. Even though technologies like DirectX, OpenGL and Glide provide this all for you on a platter today; if you want to understand the maths that they all share at their core, this is the book !

In the late 1980's I taught a computer science course in computer graphics and I used this book as the text. It was one of the most interesting courses I have ever taught, the students and I had a lot of fun. The action on the screen was slow and patience was required as we were running Turbo Pascal on IBM PC's.
Although it is now dated, this book was more than adequate for our needs. While it was abbreviated, the coverage was complete, well suited for a beginning course where the emphasis was on the mathematical foundations rather than the modern bells and whistles. Even today, if I were to offer a computer graphics course, I would consider using this book as a supplement, computer power may have advanced over the years, but the mathematics has stayed the same.

I bought this for its worked examples in graphics, particularly projections and perspective transformations. It covers these topics throughly and clearly. The chapters on clipping to the view frustrum and transforming to the device coordinates were also excellent. The material on general graphics transformations was easy to follow. The appendices cover necessary parts of vector algebra and geometry. The level seems suited for a reader who has had undergraduate vectors and calculus classes. This book is complete, understandable and certainly a bargain compared to other texts costing 5 times as much