In a world where everything from how we take pictures to how we get our food is designed to happen as quickly and easily as possible, it can take a lot longer to learn how to make it all work behind the scenes. Theories and concepts can weigh you down when all you really want to know is how to create, design and go. That's where OpenGL SuperBible comes in. Complete with supporting figures and a CD packed with free tools, demos and libraries, OpenGL SuperBible simplifies 3D programming concepts without wasting your time with programming theory. Mac and Windows users will both find this comprehensive hands-on guide helpful as you learn to program for games, visualization applications and multi-platforms. This is the ultimate resource for any new programmer.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

It wastes space by covering irrelevent detail - 2005-08-02
Reviewer Rating:

The absolute best book I have ever read. - 2005-01-15
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Simply amazing. That is the best way to describe this book. The author uses the glut library to keep cross platform compatibility but has 3 chapters dedicated to each OS (Mac OS, Linux, windows) for those who would rather use OS specific windows/input/etc handlers. As long as you have glut installed and configured correctly on your machine you should have no problem getting the examples to run. He even goes over how to install and get glut running. I my self use SDL (simple direct media layer) to keep my app cross platform compatible and had no problems what so ever porting the very small amount glut code to SDL.

I was a little worried after reading the one and only review of this book that did not get 5 stars (as of this review), but found most if not all of the complaints to be unjustified after actually reading the book. Im sure the authors are in their "depth" seeing they were part of the ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board). Yes some of the examples did not work on my laptop but that was only because my laptop did not support some of the advanced topics that required OpenGL 1.4 or better. As for being worthless for Linux, I'm having a hard time seeing how this even applies since OpenGL is a standard and has nothing to do with the OS specifically. OpenGL does not provide a window for you to draw on (that's up to the OS to provide with glut, SDL, whatever). The only problem I found with this book was one of the chapters source code was missing on the CD, but since he lays out pretty much all the source code in the book in a very clean manner along with the output of each example this was not really even a problem.

I am not what you would call a fast reader by any means but I was able to read the first 12 chapters (around 700 pages) in about 12 hours with out much previous OpenGL experience. I don't think I have ever even read a book over 300 pages before this! I found this book almost impossible to put down which is also a first for me. I think this is attributed to the fact that the author made things so clear on why things worked the way they did and how to implement them in a very straightforward way. Even chapters I thought I would not like (for example OpenGL's powerful 2d imaging) turned out to be one of the best in the book. Another great thing about this book is that everything is laid out in order. He continues to build off of previous chapters which makes it really nice that you don't have to skip all over the book looking for stuff you have not learned yet. The author does not expect you to know anything about OpenGL or 3d graphics ahead of time. He also provides after every chapter ALL the gl/glu/glut commands he uses, detail descriptions and all the possible flags/options available at the time the book was written. This makes this book the ultimate reference as well. I could go on and on about this book, but will stop here. This book was well worth every penny.

A good and helpful book - 2005-05-09
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I did found this book very helpful. And I do recommend this book for anyone how is starting with OpenGL. A well writen book.

Very good book - 2007-08-26
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I am a complete beginner in computer graphics and have found this book to be clear and really helpful. I can recommend it to anyone who wants to start graphic programming.
I hope this helped someone.

OpenGL SuperBible (3rd Edition)

Quite a good book but many things to be improved - 2005-03-06
Reviewer Rating:
To me, this book is at average rating. The explanation of the book is quite confusing in some sense. First of all, if you follow the book sample coding by including "OpenGL.h" header file, you may find that it does not work. In fact, the header file name is "OpenGLSB.h". For this small thing which the author is failed to correct it before the publication of the book, it is a failure. For beginner like me, it is really a bad experience to have first sample coding does not run as expected.

Second, this book shares common mistake as done by other books. The author assume that you already know how to setup the OpenGL enviroment before you proceed with your programming. In fact, before you can program using OpenGL API, you need to setup the environment first. For this, you have to browse to OpenGL official site http://www.opengl.org for the OpenGL environment-setup details. For most beginner may think that the OpenGL API is to be used as common C/C++ program, which leading them to bulk of errors. To me, the author must tell the users what to do before program in OpenGL, but he didn't. It is another failure of the book.

The other reviewer has claimed that 12 chapters of the book can be finished in 12 hours. This claim is very subjective. For a beginner who know nothing about computer graphics, it is very impossible to finish that many chapters in that specified time as claimed by the reviewer.

At overall, this book is still the best OpenGL book in the market. This book does not use many of the mathematic jargons but still can make you a successful OpenGL programmer. This is the really great part of the book! However, for those who want to learn advance graphics programming, I don't think this is the book for you. It can serve only as reference where you want to refresh your OpenGL knowledge.

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