Edward Angel

This is an introductory book about OpenGL. We had an optional course on OpenGL in University and this book was required reading for this course.

Chapter 1 introduces some basic concepts, such as camera models and ray tracing.

Chapter 2 gets us started wih the OpenGL API.

Chapter 3 discusses input devices, the client-server perspective and menus.

Chapter 4 starts with a bit of geometry and linear algebra. This is followed by an OpenGL example. The chapter ends with transformations supported by OpenGL.

Chapter 5 deals with projections and perspective.

Chapter 6 is about light, light sources, reflection and ray tracing.

Chapter 7 involves studying implementation algorithms for geometric transformations, clipping and rasterization.

Modeling the real world is the topic of Chapter 8. This includes physical models based on elementary Newtonian mechanics.

Chapter 9 teaches us about curves and splines.

Chapter 10 mentions texture mapping, bit and pixel operations, composition techniques, sampling and aliasing.

The chapter titles could have been a bit longer and more descriptive. The book goes over some mathematics and theory. However, it never gets very challenging. I would not buy the book for that. There are lots of OpenGL examples. This is the strength of the book. Although the book has color plates and a nice hard cover, the code does not have syntax highlighting. You might say that I am too used to IDE’s, but I have seen syntax highlighting in at least one book, so it should be possible. I give this book 3 stars out of 5.… (more)