The Best Way To Learn OpenGL?
OpenGL is, of course, an important and seminal standard for cross-platform graphics, and on student Gail Carmichael's blog, she recently asked an open question on the best way to learn about the OpenGL standard.
There's a couple of different approaches espoused in the comments - though we'd be interested in hearing your own perspectives.
In particular, commenter Robert notes: "This is going to sound dumb, but I find the best thing to learn opengl from is... the opengl specification document. Yeah, it's pretty terse, but it does actually explain things quite well and you know for sure it won't give you someone's crazy misleading interpretation of how things work, because you are reading the gospel."
Alternatively, ARBaboon notes: "NeHe (http://nehe.gamedev.net) is the best resource that I have found. I have to second [toolkit API, mentioned by a previous commenter] GtkGLExt. Gtk+ is very well designed and GtkGLExt makes it a simple as saying "make this widget use OpenGL." It also provides offline drawing which can be a pain to do cross platform. If you want to do special effects that is all you need. If you want to do complex 3D you are going to want think about a scene graph."
Comments
Nehe is probably not the best way to approach OpenGL for the first time. First off the tutorials are very dated, don't touch on GLSL and tend towards using intermediate mode. Secondly they are all different authors so they aren't very cohesive at a whole.
Really the best way to learn is through the Red and the Orange Book. They are a little dry on the writing side but explain a lot. An older version of the Red book is free, but is for OpenGL 1.1, and ponying up for the latest version is a better idea.
In terms of windowing libraries, GLUT is ancient and hasn't been updated in forever. FreeGLUT is an open source version of GLUT but has since stopped development as well. The only windowing library that is still being developed is GLFW which works similarly to GLUT, but is a little more streamlined. Though if you want actual UI widgets you may be better suited with FLTK or GTK.
For extensions, GLEW or GLEE both will get the job done.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 11, 2008 02:15 PM