OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 4.3 8th Edition

by Dave Shreiner (Author), Graham Sellers (Author), John Kessenich (Author),

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ISBN-13: 978-0321773036

ISBN-10: 0321773039

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OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.5 with SPIR-V
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Includes Complete Coverage of the OpenGL® Shading Language!

Today’s OpenGL software interface enables programmers to produce extraordinarily high-quality computer-generated images and interactive applications using 2D and 3D objects, color images, and programmable shaders.

OpenGL® Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL®, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition, has been almost completely rewritten and provides definitive, comprehensive information on OpenGL and the OpenGL Shading Language. This edition of the best-selling “Red Book” describes the features through OpenGL version 4.3. It also includes updated information and techniques formerly covered in OpenGL® Shading Language (the “Orange Book”).

For the first time, this guide completely integrates shader techniques, alongside classic, functioncentric techniques. Extensive new text and code are presented, demonstrating the latest in OpenGL programming techniques.

OpenGL® Programming Guide, Eighth Edition, provides clear explanations of OpenGL functionality and techniques, including processing geometric objects with vertex, tessellation, and geometry shaders using geometric transformations and viewing matrices; working with pixels and texture maps through fragment shaders; and advanced data techniques using framebuffer objects and compute shaders.

New OpenGL features covered in this edition include

Best practices and sample code for taking full advantage of shaders and the entire shading pipeline (including geometry and tessellation shaders)
Integration of general computation into the rendering pipeline via compute shaders
Techniques for binding multiple shader programs at once during application execution
Latest GLSL features for doing advanced shading techniques
Additional new techniques for optimizing graphics program performance

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wow! This book is basically one-stop shopping for OpenGL information. It is the kind of book that I will be reaching for a lot. Thanks to Dave, Graham, John, and Bill for an amazing effort.""--Mike Bailey, professor, Oregon State University" "The most recent Red Book parallels the grand tradition of OpenGL; continuous evolution towards ever-greater power and efficiency. The eighth edition contains up-to-the minute information about the latest standard and new features, along with a solid grounding in modern OpenGL techniques that will work anywhere. The Red Book continues to be an essential reference for all new employees at my simulation company. What else can be said about this essential guide? I laughed, I cried, it was much better than Cats--I'll read it again and again.""--Bob Kuehne, president, Blue Newt Software" "OpenGL has undergone enormous changes since its inception twenty years ago. This new edition is your practical guide to using the OpenGL of today. Modern OpenGL is centered on the use of shaders, and this edition of the Programming Guide jumps right in, with shaders covered in depth in Chapter 2. It continues in later chapters with even more specifics on everything from texturing to compute shaders. No matter how well you know it or how long you've been doing it, if you are going to write an OpenGL program, you want to have a copy of the "OpenGL(R) Programming Guide "handy.""--Marc Olano, associate professor, UMBC" "If you are looking for the definitive guide to programming with the very latest version of OpenGL, look no further. The authors of this book have been deeply involved in the creation of OpenGL 4.3, and everything you need to know about the cutting edge of this industry-leading API is laid out here in a clear, logical, and insightful manner.""--Neil Trevett, president, Khronos Group"

Wow! This book is basically one-stop shopping for OpenGL information. It is the kind of book that I will be reaching for a lot. Thanks to Dave, Graham, John, and Bill for an amazing effort. " Mike Bailey, professor, Oregon State University " The most recent Red Book parallels the grand tradition of OpenGL; continuous evolution towards ever-greater power and efficiency. The eighth edition contains up-to-the minute information about the latest standard and new features, along with a solid grounding in modern OpenGL techniques that will work anywhere. The Red Book continues to be an essential reference for all new employees at my simulation company. What else can be said about this essential guide? I laughed, I cried, it was much better than Cats I ll read it again and again. " Bob Kuehne, president, Blue Newt Software " OpenGL has undergone enormous changes since its inception twenty years ago. This new edition is your practical guide to using the OpenGL of today. Modern OpenGL is centered on the use of shaders, and this edition of the Programming Guide jumps right in, with shaders covered in depth in Chapter 2. It continues in later chapters with even more specifics on everything from texturing to compute shaders. No matter how well you know it or how long you ve been doing it, if you are going to write an OpenGL program, you want to have a copy of the "OpenGL(r) Programming Guide "handy. " Marc Olano, associate professor, UMBC " If you are looking for the definitive guide to programming with the very latest version of OpenGL, look no further. The authors of this book have been deeply involved in the creation of OpenGL 4.3, and everything you need to know about the cutting edge of this industry-leading API is laid out here in a clear, logical, and insightful manner. " Neil Trevett, president, Khronos Group ""

About the Author

Dave Shreiner, Director of Graphics and GPU Computing at ARM, Inc., has been active in OpenGL development nearly since its inception. He created the first commercial OpenGL training course and has taught OpenGL programming for twenty years.

Graham Sellers, coauthor of OpenGL® SuperBible, manages OpenGL Software Development at AMD. He authored many OpenGL feature specifications and helped bring OpenGL ES to desktop computers.

John Kessenich, OpenGL Shading Language Specification Editor, consults at LunarG, Inc., building compiler technology for GLSL. He helped develop OpenGL 2.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0 at 3Dlabs and Intel.

Bill Licea-Kane is Principal Member of Technical Staff at AMD, coauthor of OpenGL® Shading Language Guide, and chairs the OpenGL Shading Language technical subgroup.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Addison-Wesley Professional; 8th edition (March 30, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 935 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0321773039
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0321773036
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.29 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 2 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #381,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in OpenGL Software Programming
- #150 in Digital Video Production (Books)
- #236 in Computer Graphics

Customer Reviews:
89 ratings

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Dave Shreiner

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Dave Shreiner started his graphics career hacking on a Commodore 64 back in 1981 (a mere 15 years after his birth [yes, late by today's standards], but computers weren't prevalent in Etters, Pennsylvania at that time). Things started to get interesting at the University of Delaware in 1988, where he got to work on his (well, his employer's) first Silicon Graphics Computer Systems ("SGI" to those how know and loved them) machine (a 4D/220GTX running at 25MHz). Combining his love of science, mathematics, and video games, his first graphics programs were for visualizing molecules.

After a somewhat tumultuous college career, Dave went on to do more work on SGI machines doing flight simulation and user-interface design. As that work dried up, he joined SGI in 1991 helping graphics programmers work with Iris GL (OpenGL's predecessor). His career continued as he began teaching classes on Iris GL, user-interface design, and parallel and real-time programming, all the while being mentored by Mason Woo. Around the same time, he was introduced to the fledgling OpenGL API being developed, and asked to author an introductory course on the subject.

Around the same time, he met Vicki - his future wife - eventually mentoring her in OpenGL programming. Not long after, they wed, and formed a family mostly composed of felines.

In 1997, Dave joined forces with Mason in his first writing activity as they updated the "OpenGL Programming Guide" (the "Red Book") to its third edition. At the same time, Mason and co-presenter Ed Angel (author of "Interactive Computer Graphics: A top-down approach using OpenGL") added Dave into their SIGGRAPH (the annual computer graphics conference) course team, and so the mayhem began.

Over the next decade, Dave continued to work at SGI in various roles, including OpenGL driver development for many of their products. He also updated the "OpenGL Programming Guide" three more times, and was involved in presenting another 13 SIGGRAPH courses on OpenGL (and countless others at other conferences). Also during this time, Addison-Wesley - the publisher of the "OpenGL Programming Guide" and numerous other books related to OpenGL - made him series editor for their OpenGL library, allowing him to provide direction and input into their books relating to OpenGL.

In 2006, Dave's career steered to a new vector, as he went off to do work on GPU computing. At the same time, he also worked as chair of SIGGRAPH's courses program (as well as once again presenting a course).

While GPU computing was increasing in relevance, Dave felt that mobile computer graphics was on the cusp of becoming an even bigger thing, and joined ARM's (the embedded CPU company) graphics group to directly contribute to the fray. Soon after, he became involved with OpenGL ES, the embedded version of OpenGL. At the same time, he contributed to the "OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide", and began presenting courses on OpenGL's embedded version.

Most recently, Dave joined long-time collaborator and fellow author, Ed Angel, in updating his textbook - "Interactive Computer Graphics" - to a new shader-only format, and is currently working on revising the "OpenGL Programming Guide" to reflect the most recent changes in OpenGL.

Dave lives with Vicki and their cat Phantom, splitting their time between their home in Mountain View and Sonoma County in California's wine country.

Customer reviews

5 star		48%
4 star		16%
3 star		14%
2 star		10%
1 star		12%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Stephen P Spackman

Buy it because you have to

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book shows startling disrespect for the reader. Nobody seems to have proofread it before sending it for printing; most pages contain typos or bizarre malapropisms, the maths is often wrong, and much of the code is either obviously broken or somehow at odds with the exposition. Important insights are, at random, missing; I can't, for example, find any explanation of what a vertex array object is or why you need one (and that's the first step of the first example in the first chapter). The index, while not short, is missing almost everything I looked for, and that's a big problem, too, since the order of presentation is an uncomfortable compromise between quick start and deep dive. But they know you're going to buy it, because it's *the* book.

That said, it does contain a lot of useful information, and it occupies the useful middle ground between reading tedious and generally opaque manual pages and reading tedious and largely irrelevant tutorials. And, yes, it does integrate the material about shaders, knowledge of which is no longer optional.

But wow, for an official publication detailing an essential technology, I certainly wish it were less frustrating.

56 people found this helpful

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Max Thompson

Flaming pile of garbage

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book might be good for a reference if you already know a lot about OpenGL, but for someone new to it, it's plain awful. There's long expositions between bits of code that have little or nothing to do with the code at hand. The authors just reproduce API calls throughout the chapters without explaining anything useful about them.

Take the first few chapters, for instance. You get to see the most basic program possible, then you take a chapter long diatribe on shaders, which goes overkill since you don't even know how to draw a vertex yet. Then, when it comes back (in chapter three!) to finally start talking about drawing, they just throw a bunch of API documentation at you, instead of showing either a full program or snippets that would be useful.

The source code is a pile of crap, too. Instead of putting everything a user would want to see into each sample program, they abstracted a ton of setup into their own code, which is awful to read. For example, who creates the main() function inside of a macro? Well, these morons do. Oh, and it doesn't even compile on Linux without writing your own Makefiles and fixing problems throughout the code. Save yourself from this flaming pile of garbage.

One person found this helpful

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jeybee

an overview and reference

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2016

Verified Purchase

More of an overview and reference than a tutorial. If you want a tutorial, get your hands dirty with Anton's OpenGL (free online). If you are a beginner, I would only recommend you plowing through this book if you need the vocabulary. You are going to be lost without some graphics engine architecture. If you already know the concepts for the most part, seeing it again here isn't going to improve your understanding, but you will be stuck on things you haven't seen before, so again will be of little help. The provided code looks like it was pulled from the previous version, is missing some chapters. You should try to find the SDL conversions to run in VS. The best this books does is to help you form a cohesion on what is going on, which earns back a star. Overall, slightly disappointed, however it is fine as a pass through to your furthur studies and a prelude to the blue book.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Badly needs editors.

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2016

Verified Purchase

I'll start by saying that this book has a lot of useful information. It is however in rather desperate need of a team of editors. I'm not good enough at 3D stuff yet to be able to critique the math, but there are loads of typos and even incorrect references to other parts of the text. The information it presents is also in an entirely inconvenient order. Many times you'll be reading along and feeling like you are missing something only to eventually come across a line like "don't worry, we'll talk in more detail about XYZ later." If I need that knowledge to not feel lost where I am, shouldn't it be in the book before I got here?

One person found this helpful

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Jeremiah LaRocco

and the overall organization is bad. After the two introductory chapters

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2017

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The writing is repetitive and awkward to read, and the overall organization is bad. After the two introductory chapters, the rest of the book is essentially a rehash of the OpenGL spec, and you're better off just reading about it there.

There is sample code, but it often doesn't show anything beyond what you can already tell from the function signature. There are no bigger examples showing how to tie things together, andexcept for the introductory triangle program, there are no complete examples. Some of the code even has easy to notice syntactic and logical errors.

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M. Pasamonik

Good book, but rife with spelling errors

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2013

Verified Purchase

As far as OpenGL books go, this one does an excellent job of explaining the API in a sensible order. I am also happy to report that the content of the book is much improved over the 7th edition, which was a confused mix of OpenGL 2.1- and 3.3+.

The book assumes you are already proficient with C/C++ and have a basic understanding of linear algebra and computer graphics. If you are a beginner programmer that would like to do graphical programming, do NOT get this book. It will be way over your head and you will be disappointed. There are simpler alternatives - SDL and the likes. Again, the target demographic for this book is intermediate to experienced programmers.

I would have given this book five stars, but the Kindle edition is rife with spelling and grammatical errors, even in the code examples! The spelling errors in the code examples make certain examples difficult to understand, especially when variable names change midway through the code. Not cool, guys (authors). Don't include code snippets that would generate compile time errors.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Hans Guijt

This book goes into great detail about pointless and redundant functions

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

The book claims to be "the official guide to learning OpenGL", but it does an absolutely lousy job at helping you understand this complex API. It represents an enormous step back from the previous version 2 book, which I also have.

This book goes into great detail about pointless and redundant functions, like explaining how to allocate, de-allocate, bind, and query for the existence of every type of OpenGL resource (which typically gets a full page per resource, but is always the same except for the function name) - yet it fails to explain what it actually is you are allocating, or what you might use it for, or what a good strategy for its use is.

As an example: what is a VAO? Sure, having read the book, I know how to allocate one now - now tell me: why would I? What does it do, and how do I best use it?

Function arguments are also barely explained. A vital table, explaining what the arguments to glReadBuffer() actually do, and that was present in the predecessor book, is now missing. I understand a book must have a limited length, but a book that positions itself as "the official guide to learning" should surely prioritize the basics of the API over much more esoteric subjects like the procedural texturing chapter?

There's also the use of home-grown software to skip over certain important details - the book uses several pages to describe how to use a function that isn't even in OpenGL, but part of the authors' personal library. Meanwhile, any explanation of the OpenGL API being called inside that function is missing completely - and a listing for the function is also missing.

All in all, this is a pretty useless and confusing book. If you are buying this in the hopes of understanding OpenGL, you will have a long struggle ahead of you including many trips to the internet to try and figure out what all those weird functions really do.

7 people found this helpful

P. Morriss

OK book, but web guides are a lot cheaper and proved more helpful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book has been touted by a lot of websites as the 'de facto' OpenGL book, it is OK, but, it has the tendency to introduce a section of code, without really explaining, resulting in me having to search the internet for help.

My second criticism is that it relies heavily on 3rd party library such as GLUT, which isn't always what you want.

Lastly, the kindle book has a few formatting issues. A few of the links sent me to blank pages or to an incorrect page.

Damian Regan

Fantastic Book - Money Well Spent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

I just received my copy of this book today and I must say I'm impressed.

I have a fairly strong background in C/C++ but have not really done any computer graphics work and I am currently trying to learn Java, OpenGL and JOGL all at once for a large cross-platform project. I bought this book really expecting to have my work cut out for me in applying the techniques and code samples in Java; I couldn't have been more wrong. In the first day, I have pushed through three and a bit chapters of this book and have all the source code samples so far working in Java without GLUT (albeit with a bit of Googling for JOGL info). Side note: for those that don't want to use GLUT, it is easy enough to remove. The book only uses that for OS-specific stuff like windows and event handling to make the code samples smaller and more portable. All the OpenGL info is still there.

The topics are presented in a logical order and explained well, and from skimming through the rest of the book it looks like pretty much everything I need is in this one book. I already feel like I am on my way to becoming a decent graphics programmer, because the book is helping me to actually *understand* what I'm doing and what is going on behind the scenes rather than just throwing code at me.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an in-depth yet easy to read reference and tutorial on modern graphics programming. The only reason I'm giving four stars rather than five is that as of this writing the full source code is apparently still not available :(

Pawel Zackiewicz

Good book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2014

Verified Purchase

I had started learning OpenGL as a part of my university degree and this book is helpful so far. However, some parts of the code given in this book are little bit confusing. Overall is really good.

Mr Cresswell

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2015

Verified Purchase

excellent

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