Opengl and general 3d books

Hi, I have been learning C/C++ for about a year now. I believe I know them pretty well, and I have purchased a windows 98 programming book and am understanding it fairly well. I also purchased a DirectX book to learn DirectInput/Sound/Music. I took a look at D3D and decided against it becasue of what I have read about it, and how complicated it looks. I have decided to use opengl. I was just wondering what books would help me the most to learn opengl, btw…im a beginner to the whole graphics/3d graphics world. Maybe I would need more than one book, like one for opengl and one for graphics theory.
Thanks for your help.

OpenGl Programming Guide 3rd Edition (the “Red Book”).
OpenGl SuperBible 2nd Edition.
This web site
NeHe tutorials
That’ll keep you busy.

Thanks for the info Glenn. I guess I’ll head over to amazon, or some local bookstore and check out those books. Actually, I have already been to Nehe’s tutorials…it is very good(I guess thats why u reccomended it!), once i learn basic opengl it will become an invaluble rescource!
Last part of my decision making…to use GLUT, or to use win32api, i already know the basics to win32api, however im willing to learn GLUT if it will be any better. Any comments on GLUT and Win32API?(btw im not really thinking of porting to other platforms).
Thanks for the help once again.

Real-Time Rendering by Thomas Muller and Eric Haines.

great book about graphics in general. It gives an overview of a large chunk of graphics and give reference to other books/web page to where to look.

So far it has been my best graphic theory book I bought

I guess the “Red Book” is ok, but I really feel that it could be organized better and could provide better examples. Plus, I think that book could ( should ) have been written with about half the number of pages.

But all of that aside, if you have no plans to port, I would really recommend using Win32 as opposed to GLUT. You’ll have to put in more work to get it set up, but you’ll also gain quite a lot of flexibility in the process. NeHe has good examples of setting up a Win32 shell for your OpenGL app.

I agree with Geoff. I have a sense that with glut you take a performance hit also but I could easily be wrong. I think you learn more with win32. I’m thinking glut is great for simple models but becomes problematic when it starts to get complicated. But if others say ‘go glut’ by all means listen I’m sure they have good reasons.
Glenn