Customer Reviews

Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics, 4th Edition

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

 

 

This is the recently updated version of this classic book on visualization that has some people confused due to its name. Because it is named "Visualization Toolkit" you might believe it to be a tutorial on VTK 5.0. This is not the case. This version is updated to take advantage of VTK 5.0's capabilities, but it also functions as a very accessible textbook on all kinds of visualization algorithms and their implementation using VTK. In my opinion it is better than textbooks on the subject of information visualization because of its practical stance and number of examples. The table of contents is as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Object-Oriented Design
3. Computer Graphics Primer
4. Visualization Pipeline
5. Basic Data Representation
6. Fundamental Algorithms
7. Advanced Computer Graphics
8. Advanced Data Representation
9. Advanced Algorithms
10. Image Processing
11. Visualization on the Web
12. Applications

The sections on object-orientation and basic computer graphics are somewhat abbreviated, so you should already know this material before reading this book and use these sections just as reference and as a refresher. The chapters devoted to algorithms and to visualization are the best chapters. There are programming exercises at the conclusion of each chapter to give you some practice using VTK. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the algorithms of visualization and their implementation using VTK 5.0.

I was disappointed with this book. I'll be honest and say that my intentions were to learn VTK. But I knew going into this book that I would not be learning specifically VTK, rather how to visualize data.
That said, this book seriously lacked in examples. I had hoped to at least gain a basic understanding of VTK from it via examples, but alas, nothing. The book is almost straight theory. While I understand the intentions of this book are not to teach VTK, I don't see you how you can teach Visualization without at least giving the reader some examples, examples which I wrongly assumed would be in VTK.

The theory is all good, but as a reader this book gave me no indication of how to implement any of it.