Books on OpenGL

Hi,
Can you offer any OpenGL book which explains OpenGL by using Visual C++ ?

thanks a lot.

I’m not sure how much this well help, but here’s a few suggestions…

While I’ve been coding for longer than I can remember, I’m rather new to OpenGL as well. The first books I purchased on the subject were the infamous red and blue books. I consider them the best source of info, and they’re mostly platform independent so you can apply the knowledge contained there to almost any situation.

If you’re looking for an OGL book written specificaly for the Visual C++ compiler, I don’t know of any titles, but I’m sure they’re around. My question though, is why?

Visual C++ draws most of it’s strength due to its integration with the MFC and OLE/ATL/COM technologies which are rather bloated and microsoft specific. For a high-performance graphics app, I would recommend staying as far away from those technologies as possible. While being able to use CWnd derived objects and the rather friendly CString might be attractive initially, the performance hit from doing so outweighs the ease of use.

If you’re just looking for a C++ approach to using OpenGL, my advice is to initially wrap your OGL calls in a class, and inherit and build on that framework. If you’re simply looking for an easy way to get OGL code to compile in VC++ 5 or 6, I would recommend using a NeHe tutorial as a foundation and build off that.

Recently I worte a custom AppWizard that sets all the build options and generates a bare-bones OGL app and is buildable immediately. If you want, I can either e-mail it to you or make it available for download. But since I’m green as well, you probably will evolve beyond the template in no time as I have done.

My philosophy is to do things the hard way first, and then use toolkits and libraries to simplify the process. The knowledge learned by those late night debugging sessions is priceless.

Hope this helps.
Dave

I have recently ordered a book called “The OpenGL Superbible” from amazon.co.uk. Supoposedly its pretty good and the user reviews are all positive. I deals with OpenGL coding in a Win32 development environment.

Max

Make sure you get the 2nd edition though, the first is a little out of date.