I have had this book for only a few hours and already I am understanding more and more that would never have occurred to me elsewhere. Example, that games convert OpenGL Shader Language code to HLSL shader code, or vice versa, all on the fly depending on the computer it sits on. This information is not really well known.
My Background first.
I started to learn shaders with DarkBasic Pro. What I had done is made a landscape with water and shadows. I then realized how slow the language was so I then started to learn C++ in order to try to make my own globe. Well... in the past, before these two languages, I was really good at C#. I even made my own tutorial on how to Multi-thread, and put it up on youtube and even had my own source code for others to use. I have been programming since I was 12 on my 3rd real computer at the time back in 1982 known as the Vic-20. Programming peeks and pokes was an interesting way to talk to the hardware. Got to love BASIC !! I then wrote my own 16-Bit Operating System back in 2000 known as the LCARS Operating System. It was simple, and not much to it. Pure Assembly Language.
What I am currently doing.
Lately, for the past couple years, I have been studying and interacting with others using C++ to learn OpenGL and how virtual worlds in general works. I finally was able to make a sphere from scratch, which by the way made things a lot simpler once I got the advanced math down. That alone took me a year to understand just for the sphere alone. Much of my hair had been pulled out at this point and I honestly gave up the project a couple times thinking I will never get and understanding of this. But I had met some friends from youtube whom had already setup their virtual planet demos. They gave me lots of material for me to read and they helped me out getting a few principles understood. All the meanwhile, I had been learning OpenGL and how it all works. I soon realized OpenGL is actually very simple once you get a basic idea of which versions do what at what time period with what video card its interacting with. I have a blog showing how to setup such a monster using Code::Blocks IDE with the MinGW C++ Compiler. All my source code thus far is on there.
What this book does for me.
This book shows how to do everything I learned, but in one simple book ( I'm referring to Graphics and games and planet making in general ). What took me 2 years just to understand, this book shows you in only a few hours of reading. AND, the interesting part that gets me, is that its for C#. JAVA and C# being almost the same language, but written by two different companies, made me head into C++ because of lack of speed and optimizations, plus not to mention they are both Virtual Machine Languages... OR so I thought. This book goes into Advanced algorithms that not many books explain in such a simple way. They have Full source code on their website, and you can test out many of the examples to play with to get a better understanding. But the book does a brilliant job doing that. AND the fact that it even goes into multi-threading too, makes this book extremely valuable.
Code and beyond.
The source code worked like a charm once I realized what the compile error was. It was just telling me to change the target CPU since I was on a 64-Bit machine ( Windows 7 ). So I did as it asked and changed it and the code compiled with no problems. No added libraries needed, nothing. It worked AS ADVERTISED. So this made it easier for me to follow along in the book.
Two authors wrote this, and I have to say, its the best book I could have ever read on this subject. For those who are C++ programmers out there, the code in this is pretty easy to understand, and you could probably convert it easily enough to C++. Also too, I use this C# IDE from this website ( [...] ) which is a great FREE C# compiler. And if you want to convert your current C++ code over to C#, this has the converter built in. MonoSharp is an alternative for linux users. ( MAC users, there is no direct Source Code, however you could probably port C# code into MAC using the XCode Compiler, then just load in your Glut libraries and go from there. )
This book deserves five stars as an asset to any virtual world developer, no matter what language they use. Don't let it fool you, its not for beginners if you do not understand OpenGL or matrices. You need to have at least a basic understanding of both.
