GLSL Reference books
Hi
I've been looking into getting The Orange Book. Then I learnt that The OpenGL Superbible covers shaders too and was wondering if anyone has any experience with this book? Seeing as I'll probably want to get The Red Book at some point later I thought if The Superbible covers both books, would it be a better purchase?
Also, with regards to the different editions of the books, would the latest versions actually be covering unusable syntax/functions due to Jitter/OS X OpenGL/GLSL versions supported? Any ideas of an imminent update to Max to support OpenGL 3.2 on Lion when it comes out?
Any opinions would be greatly appreciated :)
DiGiTaLFX
Hey!
The super bible is, for sure, one of the best books to read in order to understand the guts of openGL, a ver worthy reading. It also has a particular chapter about openGL and cocoa framework( in the case you are on OSX). Get the 5th edition.
I personally find the red book more baroque but it is also a super useful literature, more technical.
I am not sure how the development of the new jitter is going but I hope there will be a better integration with the new system and openGL 3.x. Having geometry shaders would be amazing!. It would be great to have a shader built in editor so the prototyping will be more dynamic.
hope it helps
-emmanuel
Cool thanks emmanuel! So the 5th edition won't cover doing things in ways that are unsupported in Jitter (on a mac)?
I have spent a bit of time reading samples etc from these books, and am also wondering how much they're geared towards OpenGL from a C/C++ standpoint. Is it quite simple to translate what they're saying into Jitter, or have you just followed the examples ala C/C++ style and then put what you've learnt into practice with Jitter at a later date?
Many thanks
DiGiTaLFX
Hey!
Yeah, most of the books take c approach using any of the toolkits available( GLUT and such).
The concepts are common to all the gl implementations( talking here if you are planning to use processing or any of the c++ frameworks) but in jitter you need to do some 'tweaks', like to implement FBO using slabs or using gl raw commands with the sketch object, etc.
In the case of shaders, well, it is a job of trial and error. I can recommend you( if using osx) to test your shaders in quartz composer or the shader builder before wrapping them on the jxs file in order to save time during your development.
In any case it won't be a waste to learn anything about openGL which is a huuuuge library. Such concepts can help you to jump into other frameworks or to use some other shading languages like HLSL.