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OpenGL SuperBible (3rd Edition) Review by Jason Thompson
The absolute best book I have ever read.
Simply amazing. That is the best way to describe this book. The author uses the glut library to keep cross platform compatibility but has 3 chapters dedicated to each OS (Mac OS, Linux, windows) for those who would rather use OS specific windows/input/etc handlers. As long as you have glut installed and configured correctly on your machine you should have no problem getting the examples to run. He even goes over how to install and get glut running. I my self use SDL (simple direct media layer) to keep my app cross platform compatible and had no problems what so ever porting the very small amount glut code to SDL.
I was a little worried after reading the one and only review of this book that did not get 5 stars (as of this review), but found most if not all of the complaints to be unjustified after actually reading the book. Im sure the authors are in their "depth" seeing they were part of the ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board). Yes some of the examples did not work on my laptop but that was only because my laptop did not support some of the advanced topics that required OpenGL 1.4 or better. As for being worthless for Linux, I'm having a hard time seeing how this even applies since OpenGL is a standard and has nothing to do with the OS specifically. OpenGL does not provide a window for you to draw on (that's up to the OS to provide with glut, SDL, whatever). The only problem I found with this book was one of the chapters source code was missing on the CD, but since he lays out pretty much all the source code in the book in a very clean manner along with the output of each example this was not really even a problem.
I am not what you would call a fast reader by any means but I was able to read the first 12 chapters (around 700 pages) in about 12 hours with out much previous OpenGL experience. I don't think I have ever even read a book over 300 pages before this! I found this book almost impossible to put down which is also a first for me. I think this is attributed to the fact that the author made things so clear on why things worked the way they did and how to implement them in a very straightforward way. Even chapters I thought I would not like (for example OpenGL's powerful 2d imaging) turned out to be one of the best in the book. Another great thing about this book is that everything is laid out in order. He continues to build off of previous chapters which makes it really nice that you don't have to skip all over the book looking for stuff you have not learned yet. The author does not expect you to know anything about OpenGL or 3d graphics ahead of time. He also provides after every chapter ALL the gl/glu/glut commands he uses, detail descriptions and all the possible flags/options available at the time the book was written. This makes this book the ultimate reference as well. I could go on and on about this book, but will stop here. This book was well worth every penny.