Beginning OpenGL Game Programming, Second Edition

I bought this book because I'm getting more and more involved with computer graphics programming and I was interested in digging in something lower-level like OpenGL. I am no professional programmer, just hobbyist, I know python fairly well now and am just beginning to put my fingers into C++.So, what I wanted was basically understand how OpenGL works, be able to follow with my limited C++ knowledge and also get a couple of yummy and well organized pieces of code to explore. This book fullfilled those 3 topics perfectly.Some of the critics the others reviewers made may be true, for ex. that the example code doesn't correspond exactly to the examples in the book, but I didn't find that a bad thing, I saw the code more like "real-life" examples to explore, practice & tweak after you learned some theory in the book.My very small knowledge of the C++ language didn't give me too much problem, the book focuses on explaining how you do things the opengl way and not on building working programs. For example it says things like "In OpenGL, this is how you must build a triangle: you first build an array with the vertices coordinates, then pass it that way". I had a bit of difficulty understanding a couple of specific programming topics at the beginning of the book, but the author himself doesn't extend much on those parts.So I think you must not consider this book as a practical manual for building games, but rather a theory book about openGL, but a theory book made with a quite practical approach. It doesn't talk much about 3D geometry itself, but focuses on making you understand "the OpenGL way", with small tricks, examples, and the well-known experience of the NeHe people. If you already know a bit of spatial geometry (how 3D coordinates work, how vectors work, etc), it will help you greatly.After reading the book my idea about OpenGL is that it is really, a bare, salty and undigest piece to eat. Everything must be done a certain way, not another and it is sometimes very counter-instinctive. But I also realized that OpenGL is the true foundation behind almost any other higher-level application, library, method, game or anything else realted to 3D that I have encountered. Things I encountered in some games, in Coin3D or in Blender suddenly make sense. I knew how you apply a texture on an object with your favorite 3D app already, but I know now how it works internally, and I have a good idea on how I could write a shader myself to overwrite the standard way...So I enjoyed much this book, and probably will come back to it often as time passes.

The source code that came with the book just flat out doesn't work. You can open the projects, but you can't open the source. I went to the publishers website and downloaded the fix. The project files don't work either, but you can at least see the source code in the src directory now.Bad/broken source isn't uncommon and though annoying, isn't a big deal. But the total lack of support shown for this book is amazing. Most authors have a website for their books. This guy has a picture of the book and a table of contents and nothing else. The publisher gives a link to an offsite download for the fix, that doesn't 'fix' anything. They leave you with no where to turn and a book that refers to source that you have no chance in hell in getting to work without already knowing what you need to learn.I'd give it a negative star if I could, it was a complete waste of money. Given time, I've no doubt you can get the source to work, there's plenty of opengl sites to fill in the gaps. However, I bought the book so I wouldn't have to go to these sites. Save yourself some money and go to these sites or find another beginners book.

I bought this book to help towards my understanding of OpenGL for college. And in my experience, this book is ok, but not that great.Pros:- The book explains most of what you need to know about about OpenGL functions, data types, etc.- It's one of the few books out there that actually has you build something like a game at the end of the book.Cons:- Code on the CD is different from what's in the book. A lot of the different code is explained through very vague, 1 sentence comments. Stuff that's not even mentioned in the book.- This is another "teach you about this subject" books, instead of the preferred "follow along and learn" books. What I mean by this is they will tell you how to make changes, but not where to put the code and in what file. It's up to you to either guess, or go through the different source code to try and figure it out.Overall, I'd give it a 3/5. It explains OpenGL well, but don't count on the source code to help you. It will just confuse you more.

As an former 2D programmer hobbist, I found a hard time moving to a 3D space. I tried other OpenGL books, but, this book was the first book that was able to kept me interested (and motivated in learning) to the end. The source code is well written in C++, well documented and it is easy to follow (even when the code is non-trivial, like heightmaps, lights and normals, etc) providing basic and usefull classes. The complete source code, textures, shaders are contained in a CD wich comes along with the book.My personal objective was to learn how computer graphics work, in order to be able to understand more complex 3D APIs and tools, and it was fullfilled by this book.This book also shows how to create code that runs the same way in different machines (time-based rendering, instead of frame-based rendering).Note: On Visual C++ Express 2010, when I opened/converted the solutions from the CD, I had to remove the other two referenced projects (I think they were created by CMake) and adjust the path for the source files (they referenced an absolute path, different than my project's path). Besides that, everything worked as a charm, even better than expected.The source code works perfectly for both Windows and Linux (I still don't have a Mac nearby for testing).

This book is horrible. The code is outdated and most of the time it doesn't work. I had to buy it for a class and it was a nightmare. If you want to learn openGL your better off searching the web. I would write more, but I don;t want to waist anymore time on this book that I already have.

The exception is that if you don't know much about C or C++ already, or don't have the requisite math knowledge, this book may be kind of hard for you.

This pleasantly thin book covers the basics of building a scene using both traditional and modern OpenGL. The distinction between the two is clearly drawn, and there's a welcome bias towards the new methods. GLSL is well covered at the language level, although functions are briefly introduced on an as-needed basis. Texures and lighting get a lot of attention, with brief forays into environment mapping, reflections, collision detection, fonts, and model loading: everything a budding OpenGL programmer needs. There's even a chapter on the specific hassles associated with developing on Microsoft Windows.Throughout it all, the writing style is clear and fluid, without undue repetition or obssessively covering everything that a particular section of OpenGL has to offer (I'm looking at you, 8th edition Red Book).For all this, though, there's very little about *games*. This is, after all, a book on OpenGL game programming, and that coverage is surprisingly lightweight.However, even with that criticism, the sheer quality and pacing of the book, combined with complete examples on the accompanying CD, make this a superb tutorial for experienced programmers new to graphics programming, or even just people looking for an update from OpenGL 2.1. The succinctness is also very welcome: I'm too used to graphics books that use the word 'graphics' as an excuse to produce yet another back-breaking tome, so squeezing so much into 350 pages is an acheivement.

After debugging this for ages and having to guess parts of code that are missing, I managed to make the program compile, but no triangle. After having a better knowledge of OpenGL (not from this book) I now know that this book could have done a better job. They should show just the most basic parts of OpenGL, and gradually add features so you can see what the new features do.It does a fairly good job at explaining the objective (well it does it too much) and it is very bad at explaining the actual code. It will show like 20 lines of code then explain what that does. That's simply not good enough, a good explanation of each line is needed. Not providing this means that it's extremely hard to debug.Avoid this book.Where did I learn openGL? Youtube, search: "Jamie King 3D Computer Graphics Using OpenGL" That's a lot better, but remember, youtube has a x2 speed option in settings.

good

I have a quite a bit of programming experience. What I want from a beginning book though is to be led through to your first hello world OpenGl program without having to install many third party (license-able) programs. It assumes a level of prior programming experience and windows programming knowledge but it has a first chapter telling you what a game is. Once you (no help from the book) get the compiler to find the thousand third party headers (SDL) you find that the code doesn't compile. You cannot pass a char array into something that wants an LPSTR.Please also don't use CMake or at least indicate that it is needed. I shouldn't have to agree to half the worlds T&C's to learn about something.I am one to try and get something to work so I persevered but once you get it to work the explanations are short and terrible assuming you know it all before.Really quite disappointed.

I found this took to be a mixed blessing. I have no previous experience with OpenGL and found this book to be a great help to get my hands dirty quickly and render primitives on the screen and build from there. The source provided is a good stepping stone as you do not have to worry about setting up your window (at least in the beginning) and only have to worry about the OpenGL code you have to write.However, as you move on and explore the book you find that the explanation becomes more high level and the authors refer more and more to the source if you want to find out how things work. I did not find that a huge issue. However, some of the source code is -- as other reviewers have noticed -- a little iffy. For example, the source for cube mapping left me bewildered for a while. Another gripe I have with the book is that it focusses too much on the fixed pipeline functions which are now deprecated. Maybe it was a necessary evil in order to get readers quickly up to speed, but the book keeps on using these deprecated functions throughout and never makes the step to OpenGL 3.0 without needing backward compatibility.In summary, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it. I definitely helped me understand OpenGL. The iffiness in the code in later chapters and the sparse explanation of the methods used became more of a challenge which helped me to get a better understanding of OpenGL. It is a book you work though once and probably never pick up again. It does not contain enough information and explanation to function as a reference book.