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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommended, 28 April 2005
I love this book, and it has payed off very well for me.
The author has a remarkable skill to explain even the most difficult subjects in a way that everyone understands. For example, The Cartesian coordinate system is abstracted to a system of roads.
However, this simplification is not an issue for intermediate/advanced programmers or math students. All topics are provided with formulas and concise material; making this book good for everyone.
Topics covered (but not limited to) vectors, coordination systems, dot-product, cross-product, quaternions, matrices, Auler-angles, bsp-trees, screen projection, culling, bounding-boxes (and a load of other intersection tests).Still I missed something. The author(s) also covers gourad shading, texture mapping and several other techniques, but they don't go into depth. Different lighting models were given a formula at best, which fortunately is good enough for me. Just don't expect the book to be API-specific or contain information about rendering methods.
The source code which came with the book compiled, but looks awful and very messy. The source code works very well as a reference, but it you are buying the book mainly for the code; don't. I hope they'll update their source code from the webpage soon. Conclusion: This is a very good book to start with. It contains all the linear algebra math you'll need to start with 3D-programming, and is explained remarkably well. Yet the simplification is nevertheless no con for non-beginners, which will probably use this book as a reference laying on their desktop at all times :-)
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by Mat Buckland
by John Vince
by Mike McShaffry
