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OpenGL SuperBible
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.
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.
Damn, the first thing I thought when I read the title was "Does it come with SuperJesus?"
Don't you mean "according to the publisher"? You need some kind of marketing background to write that sort of bloated statement. A real tech writer wouldn't try to oversell himself like that.
Could someone summarize in 3 words or less?
The game.
...would come in the pop-up format. I don't think any have yet to qualify.
This is not a real bible. you holy open source rollers need to stop naming things 'bibles'. Thanks!
z-axis-rendering super-bible-thumping open-standards overlords!
-WtC
*please insert sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
Who else was expecting a Holy Bible implemented in OpenGL? I can see the conversation now:
1: Hey, did you see SuperBible? This thing rocks.
2: SuperBible, wtf?
1: It's God's word in full 3D. You can rotate the book on all 3 axes, flip pages, and it even has full scene rendering during the great flood.
2: That's ridiculous. Who would want that?
1: Bah, at the very least you can use it as a benchmarking program. I'm getting 200FPS at the Sermon on the Mount.
Does it tell us that SGI created OpenGL, or does it tell us that OpenGL evolved from the primordial ooze that is Microsoft?
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. . .
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Duke: This turn of events came after Vatican scientists announced today, that the devil is not the greatest threat to salvation. Due to last weeks discovery of the Super Devil. Religion reporter Dallas Houston has the story.
Dallas: Thanks Duke, well let me try and get you a clear picture of what we're dealing with here. Here's a photo of the devil, and here's the super devil. Now as you can see, there are some significant differences. The super devil is at least six inches taller, uh, he has a flying motorcycle, and a jar of marmalade that we believe forces you to commit adultery.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
There you go.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I bought this book just a few days ago. I have studied OpenGL for years, but never got round to buying it. It is a fantastic reference book, and I keep stumbling across things that I didn't know about OpenGL... unfortunately it's all about to become redundant.
The OpenGL "Longs Peak" specification is due to be announced in the next few days, it is the first API revamp to break backwards compatibility and pretty much the whole API is going to change, making my lovely new reference book a bit dated. However, the reason I still bought it is because the same concepts can be carried over to the new API pretty easily and I would say 70% of the book will still be relevant to some extend.
In the beginning SGI created a 640x480 palate
And the palate was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
And SGI said, Let there be light: and there was light
And SGI saw the light, that it was good: and SGI divided the light from the darkness.
And SGI called the light glEnable (GL_LIGHTING);
Man, they do a good job of telling how OpenGL was created!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
"glBegin begat glColor begat glTranslate begat..."
I'm all for new and interesting ways to teach a subject, but this book is a disaster waiting to happen! The last time I heard 3D and the Bible uttered in the same breath was when this piece of shit was released.
Please consider the consequences!
If it's all inclusive, call it the OpenGL Encyclopedia or something. The bible cliche is as old, worn out, and overused as SOHO.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
I did a double take on the book's title when I saw this, as I have that exact same title in my library at a little over arm's reach. As it was printed in 1996 and doesn't make any mention of an edition number, I'm guessing that it must be the first edition. It speaks well of a (non-collegiate) technical book to have been around a decade. (I'm also relieved that /. isn't quite as behind as I thought at first glance...)
So, as a "superbible" is it another one of these 5 kg books that artificially bloats the page count with lots of whitespace, needless screenshots, and big section headings every other paragraph, to make you feel like you're getting more for your money?
Then, no thanks...
and a jar of marmalade that we believe forces you to commit adultery
Of course this is only true when he feeds it to your wife and her ass gets Super wide!
Posted anonymous, cause me wife loves her jelly!
I used the 3rd addition of this book to learn OpenGL and 3D programming is general. I had no prior 3D coding experience (although I've always done well with geometry and spacial reasoning) and felt the book did a great job of getting me started without feeling dumbed down. And it continues to be a fine reference 2 years later now that my job involves 3D game engine work. After I cut my teeth on the book, I ended up taking a class from Richard S. Wright, Jr (author) and the guy knows his stuff and was an effective teacher. (So rare sometimes...) I haven't seen the fourth edition, but he was talking about its writing during the class and I'd be surprised if it's not excellent. This is a great book for beginners and beoynd. It does assume that you are proficient in C++ and can do math, but doesn't flood you with information you really don't need.
Is there a comparable equivalent for DirectX? I've been looking for an up-to-date one (Direct3D 9 and 10, all the shader models, etc) to add to my library to learn more about graphics programming, shaders, and the fixed-function pipeline.
1205 pages? In one book? Have any of the people involved actually tried using the book? As in carrying it around, flipping form chapter to chapter? This is ridiculous... this is exactly the point of multiple volumes.... physical ease of use! It's a book I'd actually like to have but not if it means it's like carrying a boat anchor around.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
is coming out when? It will be just like the bible but with 6 different fonts, lots of screenshots, and weighing in at around 9,000 pages.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bible
Noun
Singular
bible
Plural
bibles
bible (plural bibles)
1. A comprehensive manual that describes something. (e.g., handyman's bible).
2. (nautical) A holystone.
You'd love the dictionary set I have. Two volumes just a shade bigger than this "bible" and fly type print. It even comes with a magnifying glass.
OpenGL is an interface with the 3-D hardware
1) Isn't OpenGL just an API? If so, then the implementation (whether it is hardware-based or not) is irrelevant.
2) How good is OpenGL for 2-D graphics? Judging, e. g., by what Compiz/Beryl do, it can be successfully used as a base for development of a 2-D user interface as well.
Try telling that to J. K. Rowling!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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.
All I see on that page is some sample code from examples contained in the book. I was kind of hoping for the actual source code for the book, preferably in LaTeX form.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Excuse me, but the title and summary clearly mentioned a SuperBible, not a Superbible.
The capitalisation of Bible clearly references the proper noun:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bible
Proper noun
1. The Christian holy book.
2. The Jewish holy book that was largely incorporated into the Christian Bible.
3. The analogous holy book of another religion.
4. A specific version, edition, translation, or copy of any of the above.
Hmmm...I just realised I've practised pedanticism in defense of humour.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I bought this book a few days ago. I have one criticism so far. The author attempts to do linear algebra lightly ... but does it completely wrong:
[4x1 column vector] . [4x4 matrix] = [4x1 column vector]
Eh? If this is some kind of whacked convention he should really say so. This said, it seems good so far.
If opengl's selection and feedback features are not used anymore, then how does the programmer implement object selection in modern gl? Magic?
Ben