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asgard4 writes "Decades in the making, Donald Knuth presents the latest few chapters in his by now classic book series The Art of Computer Programming. The computer science pioneer's latest book on combinatorial algorithms is just the first in an as-of-yet unknown number of parts to follow. While these yet-to-be-released parts will discuss other combinatorial algorithms, such as graph and network algorithms, the focus of this book titled Volume 4A Combinatorial Algorithms Part 1 is solely on combinatorial search and pattern generation algorithms. Much like the other books in the series, this latest piece is undoubtedly an instant classic, not to be missing in any serious computer science library or book collection." Keep reading for the rest of asgard4's review. The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms Part 1 author Donald E. Knuth pages 883 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer asgard4 ISBN 0-201-03804-8 summary Knuth's latest masterpiece. Almost all there is to know about combinatorial search algorithms. The book is organized into four major parts, an introduction, a chapter on Boolean algebra, a chapter on algorithms to generate all possibilities (the main focus of the book), and finally 300 pages of answers to the many exercises at the end of every section in the book. These exercises and answers make this work an excellent companion for teachers of a university course.

The book begins with some introductory examples of combinatorial searching and then gives various definitions of graphs and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) since a lot of combinatorial algorithms conveniently use graphs as the data structures they operate on. Knuth's writing style is terse and to the point, especially when he presents definitions and proofs. However, the text is sprinkled with toy problems and puzzles that keep it interesting.

After the introduction, the first chapter of the book (out of only two) is titled "Zeros and Ones" and discusses Boolean algebra. Most readers that have studied computer science in some form should be intimately familiar with most of the discussed basics, such as disjunctive normal forms and Boolean functions and their evaluation. The reader might be surprised to find a discussion of such an elemental foundation of computer science in a book on combinatorial algorithms. The reason is that storage efficiency is especially important for these types of algorithms and understanding the basic storage unit of computer systems nowadays (as the decimal computer is a definite thing of the past) is of importance.

After covering the basics of Boolean algebra and Boolean functions in quite some detail, Knuth gets to the most fun part of this chapter in my opinion: the section on bitwise tricks and techniques on integer numbers. Being a software engineer in the video games industry, I recognized a lot of the techniques from my day-to-day work, such as bit packing of data and various bit shifting and bit masking tricks. There is also a discussion of some interesting rasterization-like algorithms, such as the shrinking of bitmaps using Levialdi's transformation or filling of regions bounded by simple curves. The chapter concludes with Binary Decision Diagrams that represent an important family of data structures for representing and manipulating Boolean functions. This topic was also quite interesting to me since I have never been exposed to it before.

The second and main chapter of the book is titled "Generating All Possibilities". In this particular volume of the The Art of Computer Programming series, the only subsection of the chapter in this volume is on generating basic combinatorial patterns, or more specifically generating all n-tuples, permutations, combinations, partitions, and trees. We can expect more on this topic from Knuth in his continuation in Volume 4B and beyond.

The discussion on n-tuples starts out with a lengthy focus on Gray codes, which are binary strings of n bits arranged in an order such that only one bit changes from string to string.

A quite fun example for generating all permutations presented in this part of the book is alphametics, also sometimes known as verbal arithmetic — a kind of puzzle where every letter of a word stands for a digit and words are used in equations. The goal is to assign digits to letters in such a way that the equation is correct. A classic example is SEND + MORE = MONEY (the solution is left as an exercise for the reader).

The next section deals with generating all combinations. Given a set of n elements, the number of all possible combinations of distinct subsets containing k elements is the well-known binomial coefficient, typically read as "n choose k". One of the more interesting algorithms in this section of the book to me was generating all feasible ways to fill a rucksack, which can come in quite handy when going camping.

After combinations, Knuth moves on to briefly discuss integer partitions. Integer partitions are ways to split positive integer numbers into sums of positive integers, disregarding order. So, for example 3, 2+1, and 1+1+1 are the three possible partitions of the integer 3. Knuth, in particular, focuses on generating all possible integer partitions and determining how many there are for a given number. The book continues with a concise presentation of the somewhat related topic of set partitions, which refer to ways of subdividing a set of elements into disjoint subsets. Mathematically, a set partition defines an equivalence relation and the disjoint subsets are called equivalence classes; concepts that should be familiar to any mathematics major. Again, the focus is on generating all possible set partitions and determining how many partitions can be generated.

The main part of the book closes with a discussion of how to exhaustively generate all possible trees, which is a topic that I have never given much thought to. I am familiar with generating permutations, combinations, and partitions, but have never really been confronted with generating all possible trees that follow a certain pattern. One main example used throughout this part of the book is generating all possible strings of nested parentheses of a certain length. Such strings can be represented equivalently as binary trees.

Knuth's latest book is comprehensive and almost all encompassing in its scope. It compiles an incredible amount of computer science knowledge on combinatorial searching from past decades into a single volume. As such, it is an important addition to any computer science library. This book is not necessarily an easy read and requires a dedicated reader with the intention of working through it from front to back and a considerable amount of time to fully digest. However, for those with patience, this book contains a lot of interesting puzzles, brain teasers, and almost everything there is to know on generating combinatorial patterns.

On a final note, if you don't have volumes 1-3 yet you can get all volumes in a convenient box set .

Martin Ecker has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional video game developer for High Moon Studios http://www.highmoonstudios.com/ in sunny California.

You can purchase The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms Part 1 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

asgard4 writes "OpenGL SuperBible in its fifth edition is almost a complete rewrite. The authors threw out the discussion of old-style, fixed-function programming and replaced it with an introduction to OpenGL that is exclusively focused on using shaders from the very beginning. All the things that got deprecated with the advent of OpenGL 3 got removed, making it a more relevant and up-to-date book than the previous editions. The OpenGL SuperBible still strives to be the 'world's best introduction to OpenGL' according to the authors. Let's see if it can keep that promise." Read on for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL SuperBible (Fifth Edition) author Richard S. Wright, Jr., Nicholas Haemel, Graham Sellers, Benjamin Lipchak pages 969 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing http://www.awl.com rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0-32-171261-7 summary : Quite possibly the best introduction to OpenGL 3.3 programming that focuses exclusively on graphics programming using shaders With the removal of the fixed-function pipeline, the OpenGL SuperBible is no longer quite the heavy-weight it used to be. It shrunk from more than 1200 to about 970 pages, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The book starts out with a basic introduction to 3D graphics, coordinate systems, and some basic math concepts, followed by short rundown of the history of OpenGL and a first little example program that renders a triangle. The authors even provide instructions on how to setup the C/C++ projects to build the example on Windows and MacOS. The writing is to the point but still verbose enough to easily follow the text. The authors analyze the example program in detail making it easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code. Overall, I really like the writing style and the flow of the book.

The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functionality intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, alpha blending, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to move objects and the camera. Eventually, basic texture mapping is introduced with most of the basic things you need to know about the topic. In particular, specifying textures coordinates, sampling textures in the fragment shader, the various filtering modes (even anisotropic filtering), and texture compression are discussed. In a later chapter the authors do another deep dive into the topic of textures, in particular rectangle textures, cube maps, multitexturing, point sprites, and using texture arrays

Until this point the authors used haven't really talked much about shader programming yet. Most of the examples use simple pre-made shaders that don't really do much. This changes with chapter six titled "Nonstock Shaders" where we get a first glimpse of how to write our own shaders in GLSL, the OpenGL Shading Language. In particular, a fragment shader that uses a simple lighting model to light objects is developed.

After these introductory chapters presenting the basics of OpenGL programming, the next part of the book focuses on more advanced topics, beginning with buffer objects and how to use them to make your OpenGL programs run much more efficiently on modern hardware. Some of the examples presented in this part of the book include using render-to-texture to do reflections, tone mapping, and bloom. This part of the book closes with two fairly long chapters on advanced usage of the shader pipeline, in particular the transform feedback and the geometry shader stages. There is also some discussion on more advanced effects achievable with fragment shaders, in particular applying filters to images, such as a Gaussian blur or a Sobel filter. Finally, rendering geometry efficiently with vertex buffer objects and rendering many objects via geometry instancing is presented.

The final part of the book consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.

The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 24 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage.

If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details (or even more advanced topics). It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. The decision to completely drop any discussion of the fixed-function pipeline turned out to be an excellent choice. Finally there is a book that no longer wastes the reader's time with the parts of OpenGL that nobody who does serious graphics development uses and instead presents up-to-date information on how to do 3D graphics on modern graphics hardware.

All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible in its fifth edition succeeds very well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.

The review author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL SuperBible (Fifth Edition) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide published by Addison-Wesley Professional, returns in its seventh edition, now covering OpenGL up to and including version 3.1. The Red Book, so called because of its deep red cover, is the most-well known, authoritative introduction to the OpenGL graphics API. In this review I want to take you on a whirlwind tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL Programming Guide (Seventh Edition) – The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1 author Dave Shreiner, The Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group pages 883 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer Martin Ecke ISBN 0-321-55262-8 summary The Red Book remains the authoritative guide to OpenGL. The Red Book is aimed at the beginning to intermediate graphics programmer that is not yet familiar with OpenGL. It assumes a basic background in computer graphics theory and working knowledge of the C programming language. Just as the previous edition of the book, the seventh edition is incredibly comprehensive and thorough. It contains explanations of pretty much every feature OpenGL has to offer, even the more obscure and rarely used ones. This is good in the sense that it's a fairly complete book, but it can also be somewhat overwhelming for a beginner when confronted with a book that weighs in at almost 900 pages. However, the good news is that the material is presented in a logical progression and even a novice will get up to speed with the basics of OpenGL after reading only the first few chapters of the book. Some of the early chapters in the book contain a few more advanced sections mostly explaining new features that got introduced with OpenGL 3.1. These sections are conveniently marked as advanced and can probably be skipped on a first read-through of the material.

The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the basic concepts of OpenGL and describes the rendering pipeline model used in the API. GLUT, a cross-platform library that allows easily creating OpenGL applications, is also shortly discussed together with a program that shows GLUT in action. The following chapters proceed to explain the basic geometric primitives, such as lines and polygons, supported by OpenGL and how to render them in different positions and from different viewpoints using the various OpenGL matrix stacks. Also the basics of using colors, lighting, framebuffer blending, and fog are discussed.

Chapter seven contains a description of display lists, a unique and with OpenGL 3.1 deprecated feature of OpenGL that allows to store OpenGL API calls for efficient multiple uses later on in a program. Chapter eight then moves on to discuss what an image is for OpenGL, and most notably covers pixel buffer objects, a somewhat recent addition to OpenGL. The discussion of images in chapter eight brings us straight to chapter nine on texture mapping, one of the largest and arguably most important chapters in the book. Everything you need to know about textures is discussed, from specifying texture images in uncompressed and compressed form to applying textures to triangles using the various kinds of supported texture filters. Also depth textures and their application in the form of shadow maps and – new in the seventh edition – floating-point textures and texture arrays added in OpenGL 3.0 are presented.

In chapter ten the authors discuss the buffers that make up the framebuffer, such as the color buffer, depth buffer, and stencil buffer. This chapter summarizes some of the things already presented in the earlier chapters and then describes the various framebuffer operations in more detail. Chapter eleven and twelve are on the tools provided by GLU, the GL utility library, in particular tesselators, quadrics, evaluators, and NURBs. GLU is nowadays rarely ever used in production code, so these chapters mostly demonstrate just how complete the Red Book is in its coverage of OpenGL. This also applies to chapter thirteen on selection and feedback, which are rarely used features, mostly because of the lack of hardware acceleration in today's GPUs.

Finally, chapter fourteen is a collection of topics that didn't fit into the other chapters, such as error handling and the OpenGL extension mechanism. Additionally, this chapter presents various higher level techniques and tricks, for example how to implement a simple fade effect, how to render antialiased text, and some examples of using the stencil buffer. The final chapter of the book is a discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL, for short). In the seventh edition this chapter has been updated to version 1.30 and 1.40 of GLSL, as required by OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1, respectively. Even though the OpenGL API functions required to use GLSL are presented, this is only a rough overview of how programmable shaders are used in OpenGL. For a more detailed description of GLSL the reader is referred to the book "OpenGL Shading Language. Third Edition" also called the Orange Book.

The book closes with quite a few appendices on the order of operations in the OpenGL rendering pipeline, the state variables that can be queried, the interaction of OpenGL with the operating system-specific windowing systems, a brief discussion of homogeneous coordinates as used in OpenGL, and some programming tips. Also a reference of the built-in GLSL variables and functions is included.

The book contains a large number of images and diagrams, all of them in black and white except for 32 color plates in the middle of the book. The illustrations are of high quality and generally help make the explained concepts and techniques easier to understand. Most of the color plates depict spheres, teapots, and other simple geometric objects, so they aren't overly eye-catching but do serve their purpose of showing what can be achieved with OpenGL.

With OpenGL 3.1 deprecating many older API features of OpenGL in favor of more modern alternatives, the seventh edition of the Red Book seems to have a bit of a split personality at times. If you're only interested in functionality not deprecated in 3.1 you can skip entire chapters, such as the chapter on display lists or fixed-function lighting. Of course, the knowledge of matrix stacks and how to use transformations is still relevant, but the corresponding OpenGL functions have been deprecated in favor of doing all the transformation math in the vertex shader or, what most people have been doing anyway, using your own matrix structures/classes on the CPU. The situation is similar for many of the other deprecated features (such as fixed-function lighting, color index mode, immediate mode, ...) that are still described in the book. I think the time is right to combine the Red Book with the Orange Book, removing any discussion of deprecated features, to have a book that focuses solely on the modern approach to graphics programming, which is mostly based on shaders. I can only hope such an OpenGL 3.1-only focused book will see the light of day soon.

All in all, the Red Book remains the definitive guide to OpenGL. Apart from being a good introduction, it also contains many interesting tips and tricks that make the experienced OpenGL programmer come back to it often. If you've read through the Red Book and the Orange Book in their entirety you pretty much know everything there is to know about OpenGL.

The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL Programming Guide 7th Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "The “OpenGL Shading Language” (also called the Orange Book because of its orange cover) is back in its third edition, with updated discussions of the OpenGL shading language (up to version 1.40, introduced with OpenGL 3.1). Like the previous edition, the third edition of the book is one of the best introductions to GLSL — the OpenGL Shading Language — that not only teaches the ins and outs of GLSL itself but also explains in-depth how to develop shaders in GLSL for lighting, shadows, animation, and other topics relevant to real-time computer graphics." Keep reading for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL Shading Language Third Edition author Randi J. Rost, Bill Licea-Kane pages 458 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 978-0-321-63763-5 summary A solid introduction to developing shaders in the OpenGL Shading Language GLSL Not unexpectedly the book starts out with a brief review of OpenGL basics. However, I would not recommend diving into this book without having prior experience with OpenGL, or at least with some other kind of 3D API, such as Direct3D. The book targets an audience that is already familiar with computer graphics and with OpenGL. Furthermore, knowledge of the C programming language is expected.

The next few chapters introduce the syntax and semantics of GLSL. At its core, GLSL is very similar to C. All the usual control flow statements, such as if statements and for loops, are available. However, the language adds some graphics-specific types, such as vectors and matrices. Even though this material is fairly dry, the writing is easy to follow and all concepts are presented with plenty of examples. Also uniform blocks — a new feature of GLSL version 1.40 — are discussed. Uniform blocks are used to efficiently send a block of variables via a uniform buffer to the GPU.

After familiarizing the reader with the language itself, chapter four delves into the integration of the shader-programmable units into the OpenGL pipeline, in particular the vertex and fragment shader units. Note that geometry shaders are not discussed in this book since they are a fairly recent addition to the OpenGL 3.2 specification. The next chapter goes over all the built-in, common functions that GLSL provides, such as sin, cos, abs, fract, and so on. Being more of a visual learner, what I really like about this chapter that the authors provide function graphs for each of the functions introduced. After all the basics of the shading language have been laid out in previous chapters, chapter six is dedicated to a full-fledged example that uses GLSL to procedurally render a brick pattern. If you're already familiar with other shading languages, such as Direct3D's HLSL or Cg, and you want to switch over to OpenGL/GLSL, I recommend jumping straight to this chapter to see how much you can grasp and then going back to the preceding pages to fill in the blanks if necessary.

The somewhat lengthy chapter seven contains detailed descriptions of the entry points provided by OpenGL to create and set up shader programs. Among other things, it describes how shader objects are created, compiled, and then linked to form shader programs that can then be used to render objects. Chapter seven concludes the dry, technical part of the book that introduced both the shading language and the necessary infrastructure to use it from a host program running on the CPU. The remainder of the book concentrates on numerous graphics techniques that can be achieved with shaders, such as bump mapping, lighting, shadows, animation, procedural effects, and many more. In short, it's the real fun part of the book where all the theory gets put into practice.

One of the highlights for me is the chapter on writing lighting shaders that discusses hemi-sphere lighting, image-based lighting using environment maps as light probes, and spherical harmonics lighting. The chapter on lighting is concluded by a discussion of the ÜberLight shader, a shader for a very versatile lighting model initially presented as RenderMan shader by Pixar Animation Studios.
Where there's no light there's shadow and so the book has an interesting chapter on various shadowing techniques, in particular ambient occlusion, shadow maps, and an interesting technique for rendering shadow volumes using deferred shading. The latter technique can be used to render soft shadows convincingly.

The most interesting chapter for me in the book is the one on surface characteristics. It discusses and develops shaders to render surface materials that exhibit complex light interaction. The authors start out with a discussion of refraction and present shaders to achieve the classic Fresnel reflection/refraction and chromatic aberration effects. Then diffraction, i.e. light bending around sharp edges, is discussed and a shader that renders a vinyl record realistically is developed. Finally, the chapter focuses on BRDF-based lighting and develops various material shaders using the BRDF model, a quite important topic nowadays since more and more video games now actually use BRDF-based lighting models.

Another important chapter in the book in my opinion is chapter seventeen about antialiased procedural textures. I consider it important because it is often ignored that shaders that procedurally create textures usually suffer from aliasing artifacts. This chapter shows a number of anti-aliasing techniques to diminish these issues. Chapter eighteen is a fun chapter on non-photorealistic rendering, discussing hatching, Gooch shading, and how to render the Mandelbrot set in a shader. Finally, the book closes with a comparison of GLSL with other shading languages, in particular RenderMan, HLSL, and Cg. This is mostly of interest to real geeks and language lawyers ;)

As in the previous edition, all images and diagrams in the book are in black and white, except for a few pages that contain 34 color plates in the middle of the book. Most of the images are not overly "flashy" but do give a practical idea of the types of rendered images a particular shader can produce.

The book’s accompanying website offers the source code to all the shaders presented in the book for download. Also available are other shaders not mentioned in the book and a demo application including source code, which nicely demonstrates the shaders in action. Most of the shaders are available under a very liberal BSD-style open source license.

The third edition of "OpenGL Shading Language" is an excellent introduction to shader programming with GLSL. It provides an in-depth and comprehensive discussion of the shading language itself as well as the C shader API used to create and manage shaders in the host program. The best and largest part of the book focuses on developing shaders for various applications, such as lighting, shadows, animation, and other areas of real-time computer graphics. If you’re interested in learning GLSL and shader programming in OpenGL, this is the book to get.

Martin has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL Shading Language 3rd ed. from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "Weighing in at fifty pages short of a thousand, NVIDIA has recently released the third installment of its GPU Gems series, aptly titled "GPU Gems 3" published by Addison-Wesley Publishing. Just like the two previous books before it, GPU Gems 3 is a collection of articles by numerous authors from the game development industry, the offline rendering industry, academia, and of course NVIDIA. The 41 chapters of the book grouped into six parts discuss a wide range of topics, all dealing with recent advancements in using graphics processing units (GPUs, for short) to either render highly realistic images in real-time or do high-performance, parallel computation, an area that is called GPGPU (short for General Purpose computation on GPUs). In this latest installment of the series, the focus of a lot of the chapters is on using new hardware features of Direct3D 10-level hardware, such as NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series, to either get more realistic looking results or higher performance." Read on for the rest of Martin's review. GPU Gems 3 author Huber Nguyen (Editor) pages 942 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0-321-51526-9 summary in-depth discussions of bleeding-edge techniques, tips, and tricks in real-time graphics and GPGPU. The book is aimed at the intermediate and advanced graphics programmer that has a solid background in computer graphics algorithms. The reader is also expected to be familiar with commonly used real-time shading languages, in particular HLSL, which is used in most of the chapters. Familiarity with graphics APIs, such as Direct3D and OpenGL, is also required to get the most out of this book.

The first part of the book is about geometry with the first chapter diving right into generating complex procedural terrains on the GPU. This interesting chapter explains the techniques behind a recent NVIDIA demo that shows very nice, 3-dimensional, procedurally generated terrain using layering of multiple octaves of 3-dimensional noise. An interesting contribution of this chapter is how the authors texture the terrain avoiding the typical, ugly texture stretching that previous techniques exhibit. This is followed by a chapter on rendering a large amount of animated characters using new Direct3D 10 features, in particular the powerful geometry instancing that is now available. The author suggests doing palette skinning by storing bone matrices in animation textures instead of the traditional way where they are stored in shader constant registers. The next chapter is in a similar vein, but uses blend shapes aka morph targets instead of skinning to animate characters. In particular, the main focus is again on how to use Direct3D 10 features to accelerate blend shapes on the GPU. Other chapters in this part of the book are on rendering and animating trees, visualizing metaballs (also useful for rendering fluids), and adaptive mesh refinement in a vertex shader.

Part two of the book deals with light and shadows. For me personally, this is one of the most exciting parts of the book with very practical techniques that we are going to see applied fairly soon in video games. The first chapter is on summed-area variance shadow maps, an extension to the popular variance shadow maps algorithm that provides nice soft shadows without aliasing artifacts. The next chapter is on GPU-based relighting, which is mostly useful for fast previewing in offline rendering. Then we move on to a nice chapter on parallel-split shadow maps, which are a way of doing dynamic, large-scale environment shadows by splitting the view frustum into different parts and having a separate shadow map for each of them. Other chapters in this part of the book are on improved shadow volumes, high-quality ambient occlusion, which is an improvement of a technique previously presented in GPU Gems 2, and volumetric light scattering.

The third part of the book is on rendering techniques and it starts with a very interesting chapter on rendering realistic skin in real-time. This chapter with its more than fifty pages is one of the longest in the book, but it definitely deserves the space. I have never seen such realistic looking skin rendered in real-time before. The result is really astonishing and the authors go into detail of all the various techniques and tricks employed to achieve it. Simply put, they take a diffuse map and apply multiple Gaussian blurs of varying kernel sizes to it. These blurred images are then linearly combined using certain weights to get an approximation to a so-called diffusion profile, which is used to visualize subsurface scattering. Of course, the devil is in the details and the technique is a bit more complicated than what I've described here. Some other chapters in this part of the book are on capturing animated facial textures and storing them efficiently using principal component analysis (PCA) as used in recent EA Sports games, animating and shading vegetation in the upcoming game Crysis, and a way of doing relief mapping without the artifacts of previous methods.

Part four starts out with a chapter on true imposters, i.e. billboards generated by raytracing through a volumetric object on the GPU. It's fairly interesting but I doubt that we'll see it in video games anytime soon because the costs of this technique seem fairly high. Another chapter is on rendering large particle systems to lower resolution, off-screen buffers and then recombining them with the framebuffer as a post process. This technique allows for rendering very fill-rate intensive particle systems with good performance. Other chapters include an appeal to make sure you do your lighting calculations in linear space and be careful when and where gamma correction needs to be applied, followed by some chapters on post processing effects, in particular motion blur and depth of field, and a chapter co-authored by Jim Blinn himself on rendering vector fonts in high quality via pixel shaders.

With part five dealing with physics simulation on the GPU we enter GPGPU territory. While a lot of the techniques in this and the following part of the book are highly interesting and innovative, I doubt we'll be seeing them applied a lot in video games in the next year or two, simply because they use up a lot of GPU processing power and GPU memory that us game developers would rather spend on doing fancy graphics. The first chapter is on doing rigid body simulation on the GPU. The author uses spherical particles to represent rigid bodies, which greatly simplifies the collision detection even between the most complex shapes. The subsequent chapter is on simulating and rendering volumetric fluids entirely on the GPU. The authors apply fluid simulation to create realistic smoke, fire, and water effects. The presented technique is based on running a fluid simulator on a voxelized 3D volume stored in 3D textures. Also solid objects that interact with the fluid are voxelized on the fly on the GPU. To render the fluid a ray-marching algorithm is used. The remaining chapters of this part of the book discuss N-body simulation, broad-phase collision detection and convex collision detection with Lemke's algorithm for the linear complementarity problem. Many chapters of this part of the book use NVIDIA's new language for doing GPGPU called CUDA and the reader is expected to be familiar with it. CUDA is both a runtime system and a language based on C that eliminates the need to have in-depth knowledge of a graphics API in order to implement GPGPU algorithms.

The final part of the book is on GPU computing with chapters that show how to apply the incredible parallel computing power of modern GPUs to classic computation problems that are not directly related to either computer graphics or physics. One chapter demonstrates how to search for virus signatures on the GPU, effectively turning your graphics card into an antivirus scanner. Another chapter shows how to do AES encryption and decryption on the GPU, which is now possible thanks to the new generation of GPUs supporting integer operations in addition to floating-point operations. Other chapters deal with generating random numbers, computing the Gaussian, and using the geometry shader introduced with Direct3D 10 to implement computer vision algorithms on the GPU that previously were not possible with vertex and pixel shaders only, such as histogram building and corner detection.

One of the features that distinguishes the GPU Gems series from other graphics books was kept for GPU Gems 3: the high quality and large number of images and diagrams. All figures in the book are in color, and there are plenty of them. The book also comes with a DVD that has the sample source code to most of the techniques discussed in the book. A lot of these programs require Direct3D 10 hardware (and as consequence Windows Vista) to run. However, for most of these, demo videos are also made available so you can see how a technique looks like without having the latest hardware or operating system. Furthermore, the book's website offers a visual table of content and three sample chapters to download in PDF format.

As with the previous two GPU Gems books, most of the chapters in this book are fairly advanced and ahead of their time. A lot of the presented techniques are not yet practical for video games on current generation GPUs, simply because they use up all the computation power and/or memory that they have to offer. However, a lot of techniques from the previous two books are now commonly used and we can expect the same to be the case for many of the techniques discussed in this book. As such, it is required reading for any serious professional working in the real-time computer graphics industry.

Martin has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase GPU Gems 3 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "The Red Book, also known as the OpenGL Programming Guide published by Addison-Wesley Professional, returns in its sixth edition with additions covering OpenGL 2.1. The Red Book, so called because of its nice, red cover, is probably the most-well known, standard introduction to the OpenGL graphics API. Let me take you on a tour through the pages of this book to see what it has to offer." Read on for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL Programming Guide (Sixth Edition) - The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2.1 author Dave Shreiner, Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, Tom Davis pages 862 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 8/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0-321-48100-3 summary The Red Book is the authoritative guide to OpenGL. Just as the previous, fifth edition of the book, the sixth edition is incredibly complete and thorough. It contains explanations of pretty much every feature of OpenGL, even the rarely used ones. You want to know about the fairly new occlusion query support of OpenGL? It's in this book. You want to know about the accumulation buffer and its uses? It's in this book. You want to know about the (mostly deprecated) use of indexed color buffers? It's in this book. The sixth edition also covers vertex and fragment shaders and recent additions to the GLSL, the OpenGL Shading Language, such as the preprocessor. Even though the coverage was expanded, the authoritative guide to shader programming in OpenGL still remains the Orange Book aka The OpenGL Shading Language (see my previous Slashdot review).

The Red Book is aimed at the beginning to intermediate graphics programmer that is not yet familiar with OpenGL. It assumes a basic background in computer graphics theory and working knowledge of the C programming language. The book consists of 15 chapters and 9 appendices that together span approximately 860 pages.

The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the basic concepts of OpenGL and describes the rendering pipeline model used in the API. GLUT, a cross-platform library that allows easily creating OpenGL applications, is also shortly discussed together with a program that shows GLUT in action. The following chapters proceed to explain the basic geometric primitives, such as lines and polygons, supported by OpenGL and how to render them in different positions and from different viewpoints using the various OpenGL matrix stacks. Also the basics of using colors, fixed-function lighting, framebuffer blending, and fog are discussed.

Chapter seven contains a description of display lists, a unique feature of OpenGL that allows to store OpenGL API calls for efficient multiple uses later on in a program. Chapter eight then moves on to discuss what an image is for OpenGL. Most notably this chapter now covers pixel buffer objects, a fairly recent addition to OpenGL, which the fifth edition of the book did not mention. The discussion of images in chapter eight bring us straight to chapter nine on texture mapping, one of the largest chapters in the book. This chapter discusses everything you need to know about textures, from specifying texture images in uncompressed and compressed form to applying textures to triangles using the various kinds of supported texture filters. Also depth textures and their application in the form of shadow maps and — new in the sixth edition — sRGB format textures added in OpenGL 2.1 are presented.

In chapter ten the authors discuss the buffers that make up the framebuffer, such as the color buffer, depth buffer, and stencil buffer. This chapter summarizes some of the things already presented in the earlier chapters and then describes the various framebuffer operations in more detail. Also the accumulation buffer and its uses, such as motion blur and depth of field effects, are discussed. Chapter eleven and twelve are on the tools provided by GLU, the GL utility library, in particular tesselators, quadrics, evaluators, and NURBs. GLU is nowadays rarely ever used in production code, so these chapters mostly demonstrate just how complete the Red Book is in its coverage of OpenGL. This also applies to chapter thirteen on selection and feedback, which are rarely used features, mostly because of the lack of hardware acceleration in today's GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).

Finally, chapter fourteen is a collection of topics that didn't fit into the other chapters, such as error handling and the OpenGL extension mechanism. Additionally, this chapter presents various higher level techniques and tricks, for example how to implement a simple fade effect, how to render antialiased text, and some examples of using the stencil buffer. The final chapter of the book is a discussion of the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL, for short). In the sixth edition this chapter has been updated to version 1.20 of GLSL as required by OpenGL 2.1. Even though the OpenGL API functions required to use GLSL are presented, this is only a rough overview of how programmable shaders are used in OpenGL. For a more detailed description of GLSL the reader is referred to the Orange Book.

The book closes with quite a few appendices on the order of operations in the OpenGL rendering pipeline, the state variables that can be queried, the interaction of OpenGL with the operating system-specific windowing systems, a brief discussion of homogeneous coordinates as used in OpenGL, and some programming tips. Also a reference of the built-in GLSL variables and functions is included.

The book contains a large number of images and diagrams, all of them in black and white except for 32 color plates in the middle of the book. The illustrations are of high quality and generally help make the explained concepts and techniques easier to understand. Most of the color plates depict spheres, teapots, and other simple geometric objects, so they aren't overly eye-catching but do serve their purpose of showing what can be achieved with OpenGL.

All in all, the Red Book remains the definitive guide to OpenGL. Apart from being a good introduction, it also contains many interesting tips and tricks that make the experienced OpenGL programmer come back to it often. If you've read through the Red Book and the Orange Book in their entirety you pretty much know everything there is to know about OpenGL.

Martin has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL Programming Guide (Sixth Edition) - The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2.1 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Martin Ecker writes "The OpenGL SuperBible, in its vastly expanded fourth edition, is the latest addition to the Addison-Wesley Professional OpenGL series. According to the authors it 'strives to provide the world's best introduction to not only OpenGL, but 3D graphics programming in general.' A tough goal to achieve." Read the rest of Martin's review to see if the book keeps its promise. OpenGL SuperBible (Fourth Edition) author Richard S. Wright, Jr., Benjamin Lipchak, Nicholas Haemel pages 1205 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0321498828 summary A solid introduction to OpenGL programming that focuses on both the old-style fixed-function pipeline and new-style shaders.

The OpenGL SuperBible, is split into three parts, appropriately called the old testament, the new testament, and the apocrypha. Arguably, appendix C, an OpenGL API reference with more than 350 pages, could be considered a fourth part even though it isn't listed as such in the table of contents.

The old testament provides an introduction to both OpenGL programming with the fixed-function pipeline and to the basics of 3D graphics programming. The new testament then moves on to describe how shaders, small programs that run on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), allow us to use the programmable features of today's powerful graphics cards. It also contains information on recent advancements of the OpenGL API, such as floating-point textures, pixel buffer objects and framebuffer objects. The apocrypha closes the book with a discussion of how to interface OpenGL with the underlying operating system.

The first part of the book — the old testament — consists of 14 chapters with around 500 pages total. The first chapter gives a general overview of 3D graphics and the various effects that the remaining chapters in this part of the book are going to show how to implement with OpenGL. The writing style is very casual and easy to follow. Especially in these first chapters, the book is very light on mathematics, but does explain some of the basics, such as coordinate systems, some simple vector algebra, and matrices. The second chapter introduces OpenGL and immediately presents a few simple sample programs to wet the reader's appetite. The programs are analyzed in detail with explanations to nearly all lines of code. It should be easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code.

The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functions intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to use the fixed-function pipeline to render lit objects with simple projective shadows. Eventually, texture mapping is introduced with pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. In particular, multitexturing, the various filtering modes — even anisotropic filtering, texture compression, and using textures with point sprites are discussed. The book continues with an overview of curves and surfaces as supported by the OpenGL Utility library (GLU, for short). The book dates itself a bit here, since this is a software-only, and thus fairly low-performance feature that is rarely ever used in professional software. The same applies to the discussion of feedback and selection, which are not implemented on current graphics hardware and therefore not widely used. After this short excursion down the OpenGL memory lane the book moves on to the fairly recent addition of occlusion queries. Occlusion queries are used to detect complex, occluded objects in the rendered scene, so that they need not be rendered. Most modern-day graphics software that renders dense scenes with a lot of overdraw, such as video games, uses this feature. The old testament closes with a chapter on depth textures, which are prominently applied to render real-time shadow effects.

After laying a solid foundation for 3D graphics programming with OpenGL in the first part, the second part of the book — the new testament — deals with the new era of graphics programming that started a few years ago when the first programmable graphics card came into the market. This part consists of 4 chapters with about 100 pages. The first chapter provides an overview of the programmable pipeline and explains which features of the fixed-function were replaced by shaders. This introduction is followed by a sample program that gives a first glimpse of GLSL, the OpenGL shading language, in which shaders are written. The next chapter is all about vertex shaders and how to implement simple lighting models, fog, and vertex transformations using them. The third chapter is about fragment shading with some interesting post-processing and procedural texture mapping shaders. The final chapter of this part of the book discusses advanced buffers, such as floating-point textures and color buffers, and pixel buffer and framebuffer objects — all recent additions to OpenGL that allow to achieve various effects, such as rendering directly to a texture or creating vertex data on the GPU.

The final part of the book — the apocrypha — consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.

The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 32 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage.

If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details. It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. If you already have experience with another graphics API or are well-versed in 3D graphics in general, but want to familiarize yourself with OpenGL, you might also want to consider the OpenGL Programming Guide, also known as the Red Book.

All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible succeeds fairly well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.

I have been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and work as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL SuperBible Fourth Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.