opengl books

I have been coding in opengl for a few months slowing coming up with a game and I thought that maybe it is time to invest in a good openGL book. I am not sure which book to get. Which is better the Opengl Superbible (Richard S. Wright) or the Opengl Programming Guide- is this the opengl redbook? (Mason Woo, Jackie Neider). Or should I just stick with the online guides (money is tight) and turorials. Or should I go for a generaL game programming book like Game Programming Gems (Mark DeLoura) which, although pricy covers all sorts of material I want with advanced maths, algorithms, AI etc. Is there any cheaper souces than amazon? Do you suggest any other books?

Thanks for any replies. Now back to some spherical collision detection and octree tutorials.

Mason Woo’s book (3rd edition - covers OpenGL 1.2) was highly recommended to me by my professor. I’ve only started to read it, but it looks like an excellent text. It’s quite expensive though; why not try to get it at your public library first? They can usually order books like that, and it will give you a good idea before you buy. Oh - and as far as I know, it is not the red book.

Hi Tim,

you can check them before you buy at:
(Notice that these are previous releases of their books)

OpenGL Programming Guide
(The Red Book)

OpenGL Reference Manual
(The Blue Book)

OpenGL Super Bible

I found the OpenGL SuperBible very useful
as an OpenGL newbie. But some in depth techniques are not discussed. So maybe the Red Book is the answer to all your OpenGL related questions.

But if your questions are not (only) OpenGL API related, you should start indeed reading a book as the Game Programming Gems. In this book a lot of in-depth game programming subjects are discussed. You should have quite some graphics programming experience (preferably in OpenGL) to apply some of this techniques. However, it’s quite an impressive book.

But before spending your money, maybe you should checkout all the great sites for game and OpenGL development. You can check them out on my homepage in the OpenGL section(under the links: “Other Useful Links” and “Tutorials”).

Hope this helps,

Daniel Palomo van Es.

[This message has been edited by DPalomo (edited 01-04-2001).]

Thanks alot, Tim

Hi
Also read the OpenGL Superbible as well and I also think it is a very good book for beginners. However I started just 2 months ago with OpenGL because someone gave me the url of a very good homepage:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Try this one, you will find a lot of useful stuff.

Good luck.

i bought a copy of the superbible on the advise of a friend at it is very good. As said perviously it deosnt contain all the theory and all ythe graphics are black and white. It does have lots of examples though and explains things in plain english. cheaper on amazon too. the red book is on-line somwhere anyway so there isnt much point buying it.

-kebabinho

Jan2000 - thanks, I use nehe’s tutorials all the time.

Kebabinho - thanks, you can also get tyhe superbible online.

I think i will get the game programming games as it is not online and covers more of the stuff I want like AI, BSP’s and loads of advanced maths.