Anyone recomend an OpenGL book?

[Dad1916]

Looking for pretty much a beginners book to OpenGL. Lots of them out there on amazon and am therefore looking for recomendations. Saw this demo today http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16327 which reminded me to start learning OpenGL  

[Shockwave]

Glrez is a cool demo, I think Rez had some pretty good tuition from Keops on that one and as far as I know, he hasn't released anything since that intro.
You could do worse than checking out the Nehe tutorials;

http://nehe.gamedev.net/

That's where a lot of people start, I'm sure that there'll be people along to reccomend books too.

[Dad1916]

Glrez is a cool demo, I think Rez had some pretty good tuition from Keops on that one and as far as I know, he hasn't released anything since that intro.
You could do worse than checking out the Nehe tutorials;

http://nehe.gamedev.net/

That's where a lot of people start, I'm sure that there'll be people along to reccomend books too.

Glrez is simply beautiful. All the thumbs up he got from the pouet critics too! This is inspired me! 

[Shockwave]

Yip, but don't forget that Rez is a long time member of Pouet and has a lot of friends there so he is less likely to get thumbed down, and also most people over there are in love with anything Keops and Hitchhikr produce (I include myself there) so if they have helped on a prod then it won't get thumbed down. (Both are really good coders and actually seem to have not let the fame of being good coders go to thier heads unlike a few people there).

However, Glrez is a great 1st prod, I am not taking anything away from that, it's just a shame he didn't follow it up.

But in any case, just be prepared for some very honest (and sometimes unfair) critique and just let it all go over your head if you want to release stuff over there.

[Clyde]

GameDev have some cool books on coding and also one devoted to OpenGL Rootuid Dude, it's were I got mine from, yet to read it through it mind.

[taj]

Well you can do a lot worse than the so called "red book" which is the opengl bible really. I quite like adding "The OpenGL Superbible" to this for its windows specific advice (windowing, threads, fonts etc.) but a lot of people think the book isnt that good. Then once you have got the basics under control, try the "orange book" which is about the opengl shader language. It is *not* a great book: dry and written like a spec but it is useful.

Do not waste your money on "Advanced Rendering Techniques using OpenGL" which has almost no code and in anycase is old news compared to shaders. Also forget about any book claiming to explain extensions which is out of date befire it arrives in most cases.

Lastly I'd advise buying "So you want to be a democoder?" which uses Opengl and GCC. Trouble is, I havent started writing it yet but it'll be great  when I do.

[Shockwave]

Well I just ordered the "red book" and also "The OpenGL Superbible" !

I'll let you know how it goes along
I know that the advice given was for Rootuid really but I really need to learn this stuff.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Another vote for the "red book". I got mine for about 7 dollars on ebay. The examples are pretty strait forward and most concepts have an example project to learn them. Try ebay first then Amazon. I can almost read the book without needing a computer.

[benny!]

Another vote for the "red book". I got mine for about 7 dollars on ebay.
The examples are pretty strait forward and most concepts have an
example project to learn them. Try ebay first then Amazon.
I can almost read the book without needing a computer.

Do you have a direct AMAZON-link to that book

/Edit: guess it is this one :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321481003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200502104&sr=1-1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321481003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200502104&sr=1-1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321481003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200502104&sr=1-1

In what way does it differ from:

http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~unreal/theredbook/

[Shockwave]

I don't think that I could learn as easily from web pages, I like to have a proper book but I guess both are the same content.

[frea]

i dunno but except the basics i thought the best way was, to have a simple idea and implement it. or find a simple idea somewhere, and implement it , it probably has a tutorial/paper on google.

red book/superbible gave me the wrong impression that i know something about opengl after reading them .

[Pixel_Outlaw]

@ benny!

I used the American version of Amazon and Ebay. That appears to be the British version. It seems odd, but both Amazon and eBay have regional divisions that often do not ship to other countries.

And since your pounds are about twice the dollar in value you will only pay half should you find an American seller willing to ship to another country.

http://product.half.ebay.com/Opengl-Programming-Guide_W0QQprZ1133547QQtgZinfoQQssPageNameZSRCH:WDGT:HALF:TOPRESULTS

[benny!]

@pixel_outlaw:

Interesting. Thanks Pixel_Outlaw!
I will have a closer look on it later on. Btw. which version of the book
do you own. The one for OpenGL V1.2. AFAIK the actual version is V2.1

[Shockwave]

It seems that the most up to date version is 2.1.

Anyway, Taj reccomending those books was enough to make my choice easy. It's difficult to find the right book at the best of times.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

@pixel_outlaw:

Interesting. Thanks Pixel_Outlaw!
I will have a closer look on it later on. Btw. which version of the book
do you own. The one for OpenGL V1.2. AFAIK the actual version is V2.1

Ah I didn't look carefully. I have version 1.4 of the book, it seems consistent with the subject though. According to the OpenGL home page, shading is the main advantage in books 1.5 and up. The online book I was using was v 1.1 so 1.4 about the same thing with a small introduction to the shading language. However I remedied the situation buy buying the Orange book for about 15 dollars.

[Shockwave]

The books are here, from a quick flick through they look great

The examples given in both are in C++ so I figured that I'd use Devc (I really don't want to download the computer wrecking microsoft behemoth as it ruined my laptop which had to be re-formatted).

Anyway, as expected I ran straight into a brick wall, the opengl spuerbible includes gltools.h in all it's examples.

I don't seem to have this file, nor can I find it on the internet. I will carry on looking for some clues, but perhaps someone here has had more sense in getting these examples to run in devc++

[relsoft]

The books are here, from a quick flick through they look great

The examples given in both are in C++ so I figured that I'd use Devc (I really don't want to download the computer wrecking microsoft behemoth as it ruined my laptop which had to be re-formatted).

Anyway, as expected I ran straight into a brick wall, the opengl spuerbible includes gltools.h in all it's examples.

I don't seem to have this file, nor can I find it on the internet. I will carry on looking for some clues, but perhaps someone here has had more sense in getting these examples to run in devc++

How about freebasic?  You only need to translate the salient parts to run those examples. :*)

I have already made an opengl window class to handle most of the set-up code. You have Yahoo Messenger?  My yahoo nick is the same as my email. :*)

[Shockwave]

An offer of a little tuition from one of my heroes
I can't say no!

Thanks Rel, I'll install YIM today.

[relsoft]

An offer of a little tuition from one of my heroes
I can't say no!

Thanks Rel, I'll install YIM today.

Cool!  It's 8:40 here when I posted this. 

[energy]

Another very good OPENGL SIte ine German!

http://wiki.delphigl.com/index.php/Tutorial