newbie to openGL

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hi all,

I started playing around with opengl last week, and i was wondering what is a good book(s)that can help me with the function calls and what each of them do in opengl. any help will be much appreciated. if anyone knows of some websites for beginners that would be appreciated also.

thanks

2

Hey n2tazmania,

           You should go to nehe's website.  It's got the most comprehencible tutorials for OpenGL on the net.  Even if you don't have any programming experience you can still make it through some of the tut's.  "http://nehe.gamedev.net".  

           He's also got a lot of links on his website to other OpenGL sources on the net.  One of them being the "RedBook".  You should check this one out because it has definitions for if not all then most of the functions in OpenGL.  The only problem is that some of the stuff on the "RedBook" site is not to easy to catch on to for beginners.  Hope that helped!

Mig

3

I would definitely purchase at least the Red Book, if not the Blue Book as well. I own both, and I’ve worn down the edges in the index of the Red Book (the Blue book is an alphabetical list of openGL functions and their use - no index needed ).

Chris

4

thanks guys, i will check these sites and books out.

5

I am an idiot… what are the red and blue books? Where can I find them?

6

Red Book: Woo, M., Neider, J., Davis, T. & Shreiner, D (OpenGL Architecture Review Board) 1999, OpenGL Programming Guide 3rd Edition - The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.2, Addison-Wesley, Massachusetts.

Blue Book: Shreiner, D (Ed.) (OpenGL Architecture Review Board) 1999, OpenGL Reference Manual 3rd Edition - The Official Reference Document to OpenGL, Version 1.2, Addison-Wesley, Massachusetts.

You can also get the 2nd editions of both of these which are on OpenGL 1.1, which is more widely implemented than OpenGL 1.2 (thanks MS ) although nVidia provides 1.2 drivers for Windows and Linux if you know how to access them (and use nVidia hardware).

Most good bookstores should be able to order them in if they don’t have them. I consider them both a great investment for OpenGL programming. You will use the red book more as you learn and the blue book more when you are more experienced.

[This message has been edited by ffish (edited 04-30-2001).]

7

You can find the second editions of both those texts online, if you don’t want to shell out the cash for the hard copy.

j

8

Yeah, the former is the html online version of the manual pages (is that the red book?) - the latter the postscript version for you to download page by page :stuck_out_tongue:
http://trant.sgi.com/opengl/docs/man_pages/hardcopy/GL/html/
http://trant.sgi.com/opengl/docs/man_pages/man/GL/

9

I just want to add something for those people like me wich are french :

The red book have been translated into french, but the strange thing is that the cover is WHITE ! (with a red stip)

do you think that the editors doesn’t know that this book is know as the “red book” ?