Hello, I hope you’re all doing well.
I decided to start learning OpenGL 3.3, as this is the highest version my current system supports. I have been looking for good sources and learning material, but I’m a little stumped here. After some research I learned that the OpenGL Superbible is a highly recommended book for beginners, but I also found a very nice looking free tutorial here: www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
My question is, which should I prefer? I would very much appreciate a hint as to which one is better for a beginner to learn OpenGL 3.3. I am not sure because I have some impressions of both, but as a complete beginner I can’t tell which would be more useful for me.
I will write my impressions of both as best as I can.
So I got the 5th edition, and it’s plain bad.
Of course I can’t judge it entirely since I just began, but the code organization is messy, the examples do not work and the book is using a wrapper library. Didn’t this book have an editor at all? After much googling I found solutions for building some of the example programs (thanks to a few threads here also), so that’s fine. Though, I’m not so happy about doing the authors job and fixing his bugs. I can live with all that, but the biggest con about the book is the wrapper library. The book is fixated and almost focused on their own wrapper, constantly reminding the reader how hard and tedious this and that task would be if not for their library, and how the reader would be just helpless without it. I feel like I’ve learned very little so far, and the things I have learned are not even useful for me because I only know how to do them by depending on the wrapper library (which by the way looks like it was written by a C++ novice). I’m not sure about this book.
As for the online tutorial. It looks very clean, new and well written. From the few pages I’ve read it explains the concepts in a clear and to the point manner. I have downloaded the source code for the examples and everything compiles and runs perfectly out of the box. My only concern is that it is not complete yet, and the available material seems fairly limited. The pdf version of it has around 300 pages, whereas the Superbible has around a 1000. So a concern is detail and completeness.
I’ll be very grateful if someone can give me an advice here, thanks.