OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference [Paperback]

Generally a great book for those who need an introduction into OpenGL, but I soon found it lacking in areas of detail that were outside of the scope of the book (interactions between OpenGL and Device Contexts outside of the scope of GLUT, for example). Probably my biggest gripe with the book, however, is its reliance on a whole underlying "helper" API (i.e. not just OpenGL extensions and GLUT), which is great for getting a basic understanding of 3D graphics, but often leaves the reader thinking "ok, but how do I do this using just the core OpenGL libraries and extensions?" - something that must be done for commercial development.

It's the first time that reading a book actually impends my progresses in understanding a topic. This volume, a collage of chapters from the previous version of the SuperBible plus new material (which has been never proof read), should had never been printed in the shape it is.

To prove my point, here is an incomplete description (at some point I got tired of writing....) of the goodies you'll have access to, should you decide to ignore all reasonable advices and decide that your wallet is too heavy of 50$:

- the authors must have been paid on a page basis, because about 1/3 of the opera is simply a printout of the OpenGL "Man Pages" (yes: the very same pages that you can obtain, for free, from the Khronos group on Internet) without any index or aid to help you in the navigation. Needless to say, you'll never use them (it's way easier to search them on-line), but you'll feel the weight of this "extra" every time you lift the book.

- since the new version of OpenGL is so tough to grasp, the author introduces his own library wrapper to smooth the learning curve (not a bad idea in itself). Pity however that you'll not get rid of the damn thing until the very last chapter. In other words: you bougth a book to learn the OpenGL, but why anyone in his right mind would waste his time learning it when he can spend it more fruitfully practicing with the (bug-ridden and abandoned) glt library by Richard Wright?

- The book is a collaborative work of many authors and, while this has its merits (for instance it allows to condense the experience of many people), it might present some drawbacks. In our case, I guess that during the development the authors might as well had a litigation or something, because they probably stopped communicating althogether: on a page I read that the feature X is going to be explained in the next chapter, and then when I actually (and eagerly) reach that chapter, I find out that X is taken for granted "as explained in the previous chapters" (are you curious about the mysterious "missing topic"? It's not an important one, really: just the explanation about how to actually "draw things"...).

- A particularly intriguing example is in chapter 11, the author cuts short on the explanation on the ground that "A complete implementation can be found on this book's Web site.", but the code is nowhere to be found: many of the examples that should have been on the web site (especially the ones from the more advanced chapters) just doesn't exist or are fairly incomplete (some crucial files cannot be found).

- chapter 12, the book reads: "there's plenty of advanced shader examples in the last chapter". Too bad that chapter 12 *is* the last useful chapter (the remaining ones are in the section "Platform Specific notes" and they don't deal with OpenGL at all)...

- the glossary explains terms that are actually never used in the whole book or supported by the OpenGL core profile, I guess because it has been copied & pasted from the previous version of the book. Look at the bright side: if you'll want to know what a NURB is, your curiosity will be satisfied (but don't expect to be able to create any).

- You'll get the chance to enjoy the splendid companion site (wait! you can actually check it for free:

[...]

) which compensates for it's HTML 1.0 vintage style with it's lack of contents. If not else, just read the (unintentionally) hilarious rant from the author in the MacOSX section...

- no matter how hard I tried, an errata corrige was nowhere to be found: I wasn't that surprised (should it ever existed, it's size would have probably surpassed that of the Superbible itself...): perhaps the author thought that the book was so good it didn't need it (or more likely, in my opinion, he never read it himself...)

- the code for the examples and accompanying library is registered on google code, but suggestions and corrections from the readers appear to have been systematically ignored. As already mentioned, many examples are missing or not complete.

Are you still wondering why the new version of this guide costs LESS than the previous one?

If you think you have a surplus of 50$ and you really have to do something about it, don't buy this book: go on the street and try to get mugged instead: you will get robbed anyway but, at least, it will only take minutes.

This book overcomplicates a lot of things, and even when it's simple, it's using the gltools library instead of actually teaching you how to use OpenGL itself. If you want to learn how to use gltools with OpenGL, this is a good book but it's a terrible book for learning OpenGL, whether you're a beginner or a more advanced programmer.