OpenGL SuperBible (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

OpenGL SuperBible, Third Edition is a comprehensive, hands-on guide that provides everything you need to program with the new version of OpenGL. This newly expanded edition covers OpenGL 1.5, OpenGL 2.0's Shading Language, ARB low-level shader extensions, and programming details for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Designed for programmers who want to master OpenGL and expand their knowledge of graphics programming and 3D graphics, and also for seasoned OpenGL programmers who need assistance porting their applications, this learning tool serves as both a tutorial and a reference manual that can be used time and again. Find the necessary guidance in applying complex concepts, such as drawing in space; points, lines, and polygons; moving around in space; color, lighting, and materials; raster graphics in OpenGL; texture mapping; 3D modeling and object composition; fog and blending visual effects; curves and surfaces, and more.

Learn how to:

Create three-dimensional objects on your PC
Move your objects or yourself around in a virtual world
Use techniques for fast real-time rendering on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Make use of OpenGL hardware acceleration
Create interactive three-dimensional scenes
Take advantage of programmable graphics hardware with the new OpenGL shading language

CD-ROM includes:

Complete source code for all example programs (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)
The GLUT Library and Render Monkey for Windows
Demo Version of Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration
The Complete OpenGL specification in Adobe Acrobat Format
A Collection of additional OpenGL example programs

About the Author

Richard S. Wright, Jr. has used OpenGL for 10 years and teaches OpenGL programming in the game design degree program at Full Sail in Orlando, Florida. He is a former Real 3D representative to the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and has delivered multiple commercial applications that use OpenGL extensively, including games, scientific and medical applications, database visualization, and educational software. Lead author of the first and second editions of OpenGL SuperBible, he is also the founder and president of Starstone Software Systems, Inc., where he develops multimedia simulation software for the PC and Macintosh platforms using OpenGL.

Benjamin Lipchak develops OpenGL drives at ATI Research in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Formerly writing Digital UNIX and Windows NT OpenGL drives for AlphaStations at DEC and Compaq, Benj recently joined ATI to help pioneer programmable shader technology. He participated in the OpenGL Architecture Review Board standardization of shader extensions and chaired the ARB_fragment_program working group.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 3 edition (June 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672326019
• ISBN-13: 978-0672326011
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.7 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #590,620 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes no assumptions, September 7, 2004

By	Days "Days" (Orlando FL) - See all my reviews

The worst part about programming books is most of them assume that you already know everything there is to know about the subject before you begin.

This book is incredible for learning OpenGL, in one month I had gone from absolutely zero programming knowledge about OpenGL, to creating an immersive 3d environment.

I recommend this book to anybody as the absolute best resource for OpenGL.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly from Beginned to Intermediate, September 3, 2004

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

1173 pages of everything you need to know about how to program in Open GL and it's extensions in areas like shading. This is the third edition of this book, and like Microsoft's software, with the third release it's finally come together pretty well. It starts off with a pretty good introduction. I like that. So many computer books seem to leave out the first twenty pages that should describe just what it is that we're trying to do here.

After it says what we're trying to do, then it talks about where Open GL came from, why it came at all and where it's going. It starts simple with a program that's only about six lines of code. From there it gets as complex as you want to go.

Covers of computer books often say something like "For Beginning to Intermediate Users." It's rare that I find that this is true. Usually the books are too short to start out simple enough and then take it far enough to truly cover the intermediate lefe. This one does.

22 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dreadful for Linux, December 22, 2004

By	J. D. Harrop (Cambridge, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I would class myself as an intermediate-level OpenGL programmer, concentrating mainly on Linux programming with nVidia hardware but also interested in Mac OS X. I bought this book because I was interested in learning about the more advanced OpenGL features: shaders, shadows and vertex buffer objects.

For my purposes, I have found this book to be shamefully poor. So bad that I am going to return it ASAP. The parts of the book which cover topics of interest to me appear to be factually incorrect and are accompanied by incorrect code. The descriptions are minimal and padded out with enormous amounts of code. The code compiles on all the machines I have tried in on but segfaults reliably at startup. Specifically, the bufferobject, occlusionquery, vertexblending and vertexshaders demos all segfault. The lowlevelshaders, highlevelshaders, bumpmapping, fragmentshaders, imageprocessing, lighting and proceduraltex demos also fail to work. I believe this is because they are not properly written and fail to make use of the available features, quitting when they discover that not all of the state-of-the-art features are available simultaneously. The only demos which do work are the trivial ones or the plagiarised ones.

Moreover, the parts of the book which cover basics are often either plagiarised verbatim or plain wrong (much better information and code can be found on the web, e.g. NeHe, and in the OpenGL Red Book). Many of the descriptions are needlessly convoluted. Many of the diagrams are huge and pointless. I suspect this is simply because the authors are way out of their depth.

I hope this review will help anyone else duped by the claim of Linux compatability. I would also caution readers interested in Mac OS X and Windows because the examples and code are likely to be misleading and are definitely not platform-independent. In the future, I would greatly appreciate more honest authors who stick to what they know.