Yep, I feel your pain and frustration. The thing is the
book you
bought was a book on platform specific material for coding
DOS games,
not a book on computer graphics.
Oh no, I meant it was only good at that bit. It did also have material on scanline rendering, phong and gouraud shading and even a little bit on raytracing. If you wanted to know incredibly slow and inefficient ways to do these things you could use that book.
Looking at my book shelf I
see all
the graphic programming gems books, "Computer Graphics"
Foley, Van
Dam, et al., Jim Blinn’s books, “Mathematics for 3D Game
Programminng
& Computer Graphics”, and the venerable “A Programmers
Geometry”.
Those are books on computer graphics. I have several
shelves full of
books on platform specific topics.
Yes, the Foley, Van Dam, et al book is canonical as are others I have and even apparently platform specific books such as “Tricks of The 3D Game Programming Gurus” can be very useful for generic information (in fact so far as I’ve read, despite using DirectX the 3D graphics are done entirely in software, it’s actually quite useless for Direct3D).
And, if you want the details of C++ read books on C++. If
you want to
learn about OOP, read books on OOP.
I’m better with Java at this moment than I am with C++ but one of the things I like about C++ is that it’s not a pure OOP language and the conventions which can be so limiting in a pure OOP language can be ignored if appropriate.
Yep, I get that. Often the material you need is not on the
web. And,
it doesn’t show up in book stores in the local mall either.
All the
good stuff on basic algorithms was published long before
the web
existed. Start out by finding a copy of the USENET graphics
FAQ. It’s
out there, easy to find. Then learn to search the ACM
Siggraph
literature data base and get used to paying for copies of
papers.
Been through that FAQ and I don’t personally have that kind of spare cash right now. It’s probably worth mentioning that what I’m currently working on right now is much more in the realms of 2D graphics manipulation and the literature isn’t so ‘cool’ as to be linked in 8 dozen places on every website. For one example, have a look at the disparity on gamedev.net (and the usefulness of what’s there).
One of my favorite numerical books, what do you dislike
about it?
Mainly? The code: cramming it all onto as few lines as possible making it difficult to read, using objects where variables would do, using techniques that are only useful for ‘objectifying’ C (such as putting function prototypes inside structs) instead of using proper classes and writing functions in header files.
It’s one thing having a disclaimer that the code should not be considered ‘best practice’ but quite another to make it so abominably bad that anyone using it even as a vague guide will develop programming practices that will cause them severe problems.
It’s not even like they haven’t had time to improve, I went through Numerical Recipes in C (from 15 years previous) as it’s available (legally) for free online and the quality of the code had me wincing.
If a book is to be used as learning material for programming then it needs to provide correct examples.
Take a look at open courseware on the net. MIT is working
to make all
of the materials for all of its classes available for free
online. Try
typing “open courseware consortium” into google and working
from
there.
Yeah, the MIT open courseware is limited and quite often consists of lecture slides without notes or transcript which is of limited usefulness. I’m sure this will change with time but for now it’s not a lot of use. I wasn’t aware of the Consortium, I’ll have to check that out.
As for “lost to me” so what? If can get through a class
without having
something that was “lost” to you then you should have
started with a
harder class. Do you actually expect to understand
everything the
first time you look at it?
I didn’t mean the material lost me, I mean there are times where I’m sure the material exists but I just can’t find it, ergo it’s lost to me in the sense of being unavailable.
Well, thanks for replying and the links.
Paul— On Wed, 7/29/09, Bob Pendleton wrote:
From: Bob Pendleton
Subject: Re: [SDL] Theory - Graphics Server for threaded apps
To: “A list for developers using the SDL library. (includes SDL-announce)”
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 5:31 PM
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Paul Duffy<@Paul_Duffy> wrote: