OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 4.3

tl;dr: Kindle Edition is perfectly readable and code samples are nicely formatted. I purchased the Kindle Edition of this book and browsed through it on a Kindle Paperwhite. This review is about the formatting only, not the book's contents. The diagrams and tables are very easy to read. They are displayed as images, so the text and lines are a little soft. A few of the renderings don't display well on a small grayscale e-ink screen (figure 6.13, for example), but this is fairly minor and I think the text provides enough explanation. Code samples are included as text, and fit just fine in widescreen mode. In portrait mode the lines wrap, but the code is still readable. Links to images of the code are also included before each samples, which is a great fall-back. There are a significant number of links in the text to other sections of the book. This is nice for reference, but it can make it harder to read if you like to "tap" through pages rather than "slide", since you have to make sure to avoid the links. If you're still unsure about purchasing the Kindle Edition, remember that Amazon has a 7-day return policy on ebooks. You can buy the book and browse through it before deciding whether to keep it.

This book is a MUST-HAVE for every openGL programmer. Not less than a "bible" for openGL related. I own previous edition (7th edition) & the thing I like most about this edition is the fact it was rewritten (from scratch) to use modern openGL approach instead of using old legacy deprecated functions. Also, the book has great deal of information regarding the GLSL, which I understood somehow similar to the orange book (don't own this book, yet). The only disadvantage I found was some lack of notes for completeness of example given. I'll give example to better explain what I mean - On Textures chapters, there is a code sample that explains how to bind vertex data & texture coordinates into a VAO & Buffer. Then we're attaching a texture on the QUAD. What is not mentioned, is that without having a fragmenet shader with code line similar to "outColor = texture(tex, texCoord);" the texture would NOT be visible. Now, I was pretty sure that I was doing something wrong somewhere, till i've downloaded the code samples & saw it in there... A small note before/after example regarding "fragement shader" assumed would be appreciated to avoid confusions on reader's side.

Alright. So I bought this book (actually I preordered it somewhere about 10th of january LAST YEAR (2012) ) and it finally got to me. First hopes were - please let it be different than previous version (where it was difficult to build program without deprecated functionality). I started reading it and was pretty happy that it did not suffer from this. After reading first 6 chapters, chapter 9 and chapter 10 I have to say - OK, everything is organized and the book indeed IS REFERENCE GUIDE and not tutorial. But that is still alright, because every chapter starts with basic things and explains them simply. Than it starts to get complicated, as the more advanced features are discussed. When I was reading the chapters sequentially, I alwais had a problem with understanding the end of chapter. But after reading another chapter (and slowly getting to referenced parts - some topics jump between chapters - some does jump a lot), it became a little clearer to me. Overall this book explained in the end most of the topics I needed (with very little gaps!) and I was able to build advanced example program (assignment outside of this book) by combining the techniques I read from this book. Ok now for the negatives - I am disapointed, that the webpage still does not have any sourcecode on the webpage. They promised on the site, that they will fix this in a metter of days. The webpage (according to returned headers) did not change in anyway for almost month now. Another problem I discovered are the helper libraries (3rd party) which they mentioned for operating with matrices and vectors on the client (CPU, aplication). I found just 1 library with that name and I wasn`t able to get all the capabilities which they use in the examples. But basicly - this whole library is not a part of opengl and can be substituted (or even ommited) and everything will still work (maybe you would just need to read further book to understand what these libraries does - as it IS thoroughly explained in the book). Also chapter with tesselation is very short and not explained to the details (for example - I had to google out why would anyone use tesselation shaders instead of geometry shaders (which I felt were superset of tesselation shaders) - which were for me far more intuitive) - and I had some troubles understanding how to use them... Overall - I have this book for about 2 weeks and I already covered and understood about 300 pages including some advanced and new staff. But I had an advantage, that I studied this subject before (in school, previous redbook and superbible). Still I can say that this one is the best source on new opengl functionality I ever had my hands on....

I'll start by saying that this book has a lot of useful information. It is however in rather desperate need of a team of editors. I'm not good enough at 3D stuff yet to be able to critique the math, but there are loads of typos and even incorrect references to other parts of the text. The information it presents is also in an entirely inconvenient order. Many times you'll be reading along and feeling like you are missing something only to eventually come across a line like "don't worry, we'll talk in more detail about XYZ later." If I need that knowledge to not feel lost where I am, shouldn't it be in the book before I got here?

Great book.Exactly what I expected.It's not OpenGL learning book but the reference to the latest API.So it is probably not a good choice for absolute noobs.

This book shows startling disrespect for the reader. Nobody seems to have proofread it before sending it for printing; most pages contain typos or bizarre malapropisms, the maths is often wrong, and much of the code is either obviously broken or somehow at odds with the exposition. Important insights are, at random, missing; I can't, for example, find any explanation of what a vertex array object is or why you need one (and that's the first step of the first example in the first chapter). The index, while not short, is missing almost everything I looked for, and that's a big problem, too, since the order of presentation is an uncomfortable compromise between quick start and deep dive. But they know you're going to buy it, because it's *the* book. That said, it does contain a lot of useful information, and it occupies the useful middle ground between reading tedious and generally opaque manual pages and reading tedious and largely irrelevant tutorials. And, yes, it does integrate the material about shaders, knowledge of which is no longer optional. But wow, for an official publication detailing an essential technology, I certainly wish it were less frustrating.

This book might be good for a reference if you already know a lot about OpenGL, but for someone new to it, it's plain awful. There's long expositions between bits of code that have little or nothing to do with the code at hand. The authors just reproduce API calls throughout the chapters without explaining anything useful about them. Take the first few chapters, for instance. You get to see the most basic program possible, then you take a chapter long diatribe on shaders, which goes overkill since you don't even know how to draw a vertex yet. Then, when it comes back (in chapter three!) to finally start talking about drawing, they just throw a bunch of API documentation at you, instead of showing either a full program or snippets that would be useful. The source code is a pile of crap, too. Instead of putting everything a user would want to see into each sample program, they abstracted a ton of setup into their own code, which is awful to read. For example, who creates the main() function inside of a macro? Well, these morons do. Oh, and it doesn't even compile on Linux without writing your own Makefiles and fixing problems throughout the code. Save yourself from this flaming pile of garbage.

This is by far the best book on OpenGL on the market right now. I have purchased just about every other book. This one has the highest amount of detail covering everything you can think of. If you need a reference or just want to learn OpenGL this is the book you should start with.

OpenGL est devenu un langage compliqué et lourd à mettre en oeuvre. J'en veux pour preuve le programme d'introduction, un "hello world" en quelque sorte, qui a pour modeste but de tracer deux triangles à l'écran. Ce programme tient sur deux pages, avec pourtant l'essentiel de son code caché dans d'autres fichiers non listés (le code chargeant les shaders, et les shaders eux-même)! Le problème de ce livre, c'est qu'il ne parvient pas à dompter cette complexité, et à la rendre de manière progressive et digeste. Son titre, "The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL", est une fausse promesse, un mensonge éhonté. Contrairement à ce que le livre réitère en introduction, il sera difficile à un novice ne connaissant que le "C" de suivre ce livre, ne serait-ce qu'à cause de sa structure: l'explication de la géométrie projective arrive au chapitre 5, soit bien après l'introduction des shaders, qui lui se fait au chapitre 2, histoire de bien faire passer le message que les shaders sont centraux depuis OpenGL 3. Pourtant tous ces concepts sont utilisés sans explication bien avant l'arrivée du chapitre 5, qui d'ailleurs n'est indiqué nulle part dans le bouquin comme point d'entrée pour ceux ayant des lacunes dans le domaine. Malheureusement, tout est à l'avenant. Trop souvent, les auteurs se reposent sur un concept qui est introduit plus tard dans le bouquin. Certaines fonctionnalités sont introduites sans expliquer quelle est leur utilité. On se retrouve en permanence à faire des recherches sur internet pour en savoir plus, sur les concepts de bases qui sont déversés pelle-mele dans ce bouquin, mais surtout sur les bonnes pratiques qui en sont elles largement absentes. Certain exemples sont en effet tellement mauvais (par exemple, refaisant la même multiplication matricielle pour chaque vertex alors que le résultat de celle-ci est constant pour chaque instance) qu'on pert confiance de pouvoir repartir du code donné dans le livre pour ses propres applications. Au final ce livre ne conviendra qu'aux personnes déjà familières avec une version antérieure d'OpenGL et souhaitant avoir une revue rapide des nouvelles fonctionnalités. Les personnes en quête de pédagogie et de bonnes pratiques feront mieux de passer leur chemin.

This is an excellent book for learning the newest shader-based OpenGL rendering. It covers most of the new features available in the GLSL. Anyway, as a reader of the entire series, I have to say that it cannot be read easily by a newbie, it requires at least the base knowledge of older OpenGL implementations (any older red book should be read befroe this one, I would advise the version 2.1, which covers completely the old fixed-function pipeline).

Es un libro muy bueno contiene todas las bases para aprender a programar en OpenGL. Llegó en tiempo y forma

Gran obra como referencia o para aprender OpenGL moderno desde cero (como era mi caso). Recomendable sin duda, a pesar de ser algo confuso en algunos tramos.

Ich benutze das Buch tatsächlich öfters, wenn mir die OpenGL API Beschreibung im Netz zu wage ist. Allerdings ist der Titel "...to Learning OpenGL" absolut inkorrekt meiner Meinung nach. Es gibt sehr wenige komplette Beispiele, die sich 1:1 übertragen lassen. Mir scheint es, als wurde das Buch in Hauptkapitel unterteilt, denen man einfach alle OpenGL API Aufrufe zugeordnet und außenrum Text geschrieben hat. Kein roter Faden und keine A/B Vergleiche bei Beispielen. Zu viel Theorie und wenig Praxis. Angenommen ich habe in meinem Programm 1. eine fixe Landschaft 2. eine drehende Windmühle und 3. ein Maisfeld, das im Winde mitweht. Wie modelliere ich meine Daten und wie sieht es mit dem Shader aus? ... in dem Buch ganz schlecht. Neueste Technologien und API-Aufrufe aus OpenGL 4.3, aber keine praktischen Beispiel, wie man sie klug einsetzt. Somit für mich wirklich nur ein Nachschlagewerk.