General Help

Hi!

I am a beginner in opengl programming and i was wondering if anyone has some good sources that can help me improve in my programming. i am currently taking this course in my university and i am looking forward to expanding my knowledge beyond what they are going to teach me in the university. i anyone knows any good sites or good books which i can read i would greatly appreciate it if they could reference them for me.

thnx alot!!!

Google HeNe which is a really good web site with lots of beginner tutorials.
Get your self some reference guides for example the open gl reference manual aka “the Red book”

OpenGL SuperBible is said to be good too, with the last edition it is well suited to learning modern GL (3.x+) :
http://www.starstonesoftware.com/OpenGL/

the superbible is okay, but not great.
I personally found the specification useful as well, even if a bit complex to read.

And this forum is a fantastic resource. I would recommend to come here often. For the rest I often google around.

That said, I have to say that I’m disappointed by the lack of good resources, and sometimes the lack of clarity. Makes things much more difficult.
With so much going on about computer graphics I wonder why there isn’t more to learn from.

About computer graphics, I often see “Real time rendering” being praised as relly good :
http://www.realtimerendering.com/book.html
Of course this one is not specifically related to the OpenGL API.

yeah, I think many things you should know when learning OpenGL are basically generic computer graphics stuff. For example, the superbible obviously talks about linear algebra and transformations, and also about Gouraud and Phong shading. There are a lot of important things that are unrelated to the underlying technology.
That book seems to have a lot of good reviews.

One thing that I also find very important is the information about hardware implementations, to know what is better to do for performance. For example, it looks essential that you minimize the misses in the vertex cache. I didn’t even know there was a cache until I looked at this forum.
In that sense, how do you big OpenGL experts keep yourselves up to date? How do you know what is better for performance, but also the developments in computer graphics and the OpenGL API?

I don’t know about calling myself an expert, but when I need to implement a feature, eg Instancing I look at all the new API offerings and implement a test case in my engine. Afterwards I know an aweful lot about what works and what does not and the bugs in XXX vendor’s drivers!

Thnx Alot for all your help, im currently downloading the super bible, and also looking up some of the nehe tutorials!

The site only had the examples for download :frowning:

You asked for good books, which are rarely free of charge.

Here is a set of tutorials that I’ve found particularly useful. (I’m also using the SuperBible and other references.)

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/