Posted by Wade Walker on Mar 13, 2012; 6:44pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Book-recommendations-tp3822213p3823149.html

LordSmoke wrote

Interactive computer graphics: a top-down approach with shader-based OpenGL. 2011. by Edward Angel, Dave Shreiner

I haven't used this one yet, but I know Dave S. a little from work, so if you buy it and have feedback I can send it to him

LordSmoke wrote

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).

This book contains a lot of useful info, but I noticed the same thing -- the author builds up a set of wrapper objects that make it hard to see the OpenGL clearly. I think this is part of why it's hard to teach shader-based OpenGL effectively; in the process of building up a program, it's very hard not to factor stuff out into new wrapper objects, and once you do, it's hard to teach with those.

I've recently written a few basic demos using shader-based OpenGL and JOGL, where I deliberately tried to program it "raw" without using the JOGL ShaderUtils or any other toolkit, for pedagogical reasons. It probably takes 250 lines of code to put a single triangle on screen . I'm going to try a different approach of factoring repeated code out into functions instead of objects, to see if that makes the OpenGL parts clearer.