I’ve been using OpenGL for two years now but still don’t feel partucularly confident in my knowledge of its capability. I have recently changed my language of choice from C to C++ which leads me to my question:
Can anyone recommend a superb book for a beginner/intermediate level programmer using OpenGL in C++? I’ve read that ‘Accellerated C++ for beginners’ and ‘Game Programming Gems 5’ are great books but obviously don’t cover OpenGL. What I really want is a book that explains how to program games using OpenGL in C++ (tough isn’t it). A killer combination of books would be fine too.
Originally posted by a_wolly: OpenGL Game Programming (Dave Astle, Kevin Hawkins)
I have this book from Gamedev.net.
I read it some years ago (I believe it was in 2001 but I’m not sure) and I did find it somewhat weak, altough for a beginner the chapter on vertex arrays will probably turn out very useful.
Right now however, it’s quite outdated.
Many things included in the book are also similar to what you can find freely on the net. As far as I can remember, some problems were overlooked. I really didn’t like the last chapters about the Engine programming because they over-simplified design process.
My first GL book was the superbible. There’s the third edition now. I had the second and I still find it useful as reference sometimes.
As for engine design, no book will ever teach you that. Scrap over some engines and get experience, then you’ll possibly bonk on something really useful.
I thought opengl Game Programming was a pretty decent introduction to the basics of opengl, but its definately getting dated.
You should read up on all the free opengl (red, blue orange) books/documents (pdfs or html) on this site . Although most of these are not up to date (what do you expect for free) they should give a good understanding of opengl and its basic features.
For engine design I think David Eberly’s site Geomtrictools was wildmagic is a great resource. It has full source code to the wildmagic engine and the author has written several books around it. There is a great sample chapter here . The engine supports dx and opengl, but that chapter suggests that the book is opengl centric.
