OpenGL(R) Reference Manual: The Official Reference Document to OpenGL, Version 1.2 (3rd Edition)

Author: Dave Shreiner, Opengl Architecture Review Board List Price: $57.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0201657651 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (17 December, 1999) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 60,988 Average Customer Rating: 4.58 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Even for those with the requisite pre-education, some parts of the book gloss over details a little too much, leaving you to experiment with the demonstration software to work out what things do. For example, the description of texture blending modes is very skimpy--if you want to know the difference between alpha, luminance and intensity textures, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Another problem is that the arrangement of information is sometimes perverse; while it may make sense from a reference point of view, learners will need to skip around in the book to learn things in a logical order. For instance, you're told how to define texture coordinate arrays, and texture mipmap generation is explained in detail, long before the book has gotten around to explaining how to actually paint a texture on a polygon.

Finally, with OpenGL at version 1.4, the book is in need of an update. I wish I could recommend a better book, but at the time of writing this really does seem to be the best one available.

I ended up learning by looking at people's code (the Nehe tutorials and others) and then referring back to selected sections in the red and blue book as well as asking on newsgroups and mailing lists before I could figure out things. In other words, with this book, you've still got your work cut out for you when learning OpenGL. However, once you start learning more, this book might become more invaluable.

This book is good on concepts and theory, a bit shadey in the area of actual code. To expand on that statement, some of the code is indeed buggy. You can work the logic errors easily by evaluating the code. But with that said, don't rely on the code all the time. The book's way of introducing and covering topics of geometry,algebra,trigonomtry, and physics is very comfortable. You will indeed learn the beautiful tricks of smoothing and shading/lighting when rendering your scenes.

If you are a beginner developer, know that this book is not intended as a good read at your level.

If you don't already know, OpenGL does not have any audio(music,sound,etc) capabilities. OpenGL is a Graphical Software Development Kit.

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