Book Review: OpenGL SuperBible (5th edition)

I was reading this book in polish, but I think that most of my review is language agnostic as I did not have any problems with the translation.

The book has many authors and you can feel it while reading. Some of the chapters could be more interesting, especially the ones that are really abstract and I am still not sure if I have any idea how buffers work.

I am really glad that I participated in 3D Rendering with Three.js course. It really helped at the beginning of the book where I felt that many nonobvious concepts were not explained thoroughly.

I have to admit that I have watched a really nice video about WebGL while reading this book, and what struck me was how much similarities are between those (I mean while one is in JavaScript other in C++). All you will learn about OpenGL will be useful in WebGL, at least at some point so I am happy that I took the time to read it.

Because of the OpenGL SuperBible I managed to understand most of the talk and it gave me additional motivation to finish it. At the end of the talk are resources for learning WebGL and I hope to go through them this year.

Going back to the book. If you are like me struggling with 3D reading an OpenGL book in your native language is a good idea for a start.

If you want to learn OpenGL from this book and you like C++ then this book is probably for you as well. It teaches some basics of 3D and OpenGL API.

Unfortunately, it is not perfect.  Some chapters are rally hard and the last two chapters seemed really abstract and stuffed with information. I felt like someone was rushing to put as much content into the book as possible. I don't know if the 6th edition fixed those problems.

The book was really good to refresh my knowledge and let more about GLSL.

Rating: 6/10



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