IDEA: Tag Tutorials that do things the "new way"

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hello, beginner OpenGL developer and first time poster.

I like how OpenGl is picking up pace and is now on par, or even better than some other graphic APIs. However there’s a major obstacle to new OpenGl learners: The web is littered with tutorials that do things the “old way” (i.e. without shaders). These tutorials, being around for a long time, score high on search engine rankings and as such it’s very difficult for new developers to find tutorials that don’t use deprecated functionality.

I propose therefore that Khronos group announce guidelines for authors asking that they tag (http meta tags perhaps) their pages with a highly recognizable tag, such as shor (standing for shader oriented) or some other tag specifying the opengl version the tutorial is aimed for. Because it seems that more often than not search engines place low importance on the 3.3, 3.0 etc keywords.

I’m not sure if this is a good idea, just thought I’d bring it up for public discussion.

2

Tutorials that only deal with the fixed function pipeline are also often not really maintained any more (meaning there is nobody that can be bothered to add new tags), so there is the question if/how fast such tags would be adopted.

Perhaps this wiki page can help you find a tutorial that covers the material you are interested in.

3

Hello Carsten. I agree with you that’s why my suggestion was that NEW tutorials be tagged, not the old ones.

So I could for example google “OpenGL texture mapping +shor” and avoid the old tutorials!

4

I got hit by this also. Never trust a web page that says “the latest way” of doing things. Sometimes, you can google on pages not being older than one year (show search tools on left panel). That is what I almost always do, anyway. It is no guarantee, of course.

After a while you quickly learn to recognize if it is an “old” tutorial. Look for things like glBegin, e.g.

5

Searching with :
“opengl 3” OR “opengl 4” tutorial

Is actually working to find 3.x and 4.x tutorials in a single google search.

6

To add to ZBuffeR’s comment, the latest OpenGL SuperBible and the upcoming revision of the “red book” explain the GL3/4 approach in detail. Also, Khronos released dedicated reference pages for pre-GL3, GL3 and GL4. If you don’t have the monetary resources to buy one of the books and are to new to OpenGL to efficiently work with the spec and API docs, then the OpenGL wiki is a very good place to start.

I doubt the members of the Khronos group feel obliged to check the interwebs for accurate and recent tutorials. Plus, programming with OpenGL the new way is not mandatory since the most major vendors support every OpenGL version from the stone ages up until today. ALso, if your on Linux and are not using proprietary drivers then you don’t even have a choice. The Mesa OpenGL implementation officially only supports OpenGL 2.1.