Posted by LordSmoke on Mar 13, 2012; 1:35pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Book-recommendations-tp3822213.html

First of all, thanks to everyone who has been so helpful and responsive in the past week or so in getting me up and running.

I think I have enough of JOGL/OPENGL in place that I am ready for more comprehensive study. However, like the online tutorials, actual books on learning OpenGL are all over the place - publications spanning more than ten years, and more recent, supposedly up-to-date, offerings criticized for a poor blending of old and new programming models. How is a newb to filter all of this? Since I am starting from zero, I'd like to not be confused by deprecated approaches. There is a new RedBook coming out in July that might address the criticisms of the current version (confounding programming models), but I have a project on which I need to start much sooner.

==> Any suggestions as to the best available book to begin to learn current opengl programming?

Here is what I looked at so far:

OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 4.1 (8th Edition) (okay, July, but I want to get started now).

Interactive computer graphics: a top-down approach with shader-based OpenGL. 2011. by Edward Angel, Dave Shreiner (earlier editions well received, but limited feedback on the latest. Is this shader-based stuff what I need to learn?)

OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference (5th Edition). 2010.
Richard S. Wright (Author), Nicholas Haemel (Author), Graham Sellers (Author), Benjamin Lipchak (Author) (a popular past choice, but criticism of it being focused on the authors' on toolkit rather than openGL, itself. Gets some recommendations here in the past year).

With respect to learning, I am worried about this statement in one of the threads: "Please note: by using the GL core profile you won't be backwards compatible with the so called fixed function pipeline and it won't be able to run on drivers implementing the old spec (GL 2.x) like those shipped with latest Mac OS systems." I develop on a mac and distribute my software free to researchers around the world with highly varying resources. So, I would like whatever I learn/do to be current, but not unduly restrictive when incorporated into my apps.